WOMAN'S UNFITNESS 
FOR HIGHER COEDUCATION 



WOMAN'S UNFITNESS 

FOR HIGHER 

COEDUCATION 

BY 

ELY VAN DE WARKER, M.D., 

Commissioner of Schools, Syracuse, New York 




J 3 , :> :> - 



THE GRAFTON PRESS 
NEW YORK 



Copyright 1903 by The Grafton Press 
First Impression, December, 1903 










€o 



Mrs. Emma Hart Willard, 

Born at Berlin, Connecticut, in 1787, who, be- 
lieving that American women were in need of 
higher and broader education, founded an insti- 
tution of college rank for women at Waterford, 
New York, which at the solicitation of the citizens 
of Troy, New York, was transferred to that city 
in 1819, and became famous as the Troy Female 
Seminary and spread abroad a high and liberal 
culture which has inspired and refined thousands 
of homes throughout the land, was the first 
to write upon the education of her sex, 
was the author of many learned 
works and died, honored and 
lamented, in 1870, this 
book is reverently 
inscribed by 

The Author. 



PREFACE 

The following pages were written in 
the interest of the higher education of 
women. It is the sincere belief of the 
author that the method of coeducation, as 
realized in practice, has been brought to 
its logical conclusion. The commingling 
of the sexes on an educational basis was 
at one time a matter of education of the 
higher kind; but so energetically has the 
idea been forced into college life, and so 
deeply have thinking people been stirred 
by a discussion of its relative merits, or 
possible dangers, that it is now a problem 
in sociology. It has got beyond the 
grasp of the educator, who has heretofore 
claimed the right as such to decide upon 
its merits, and has passed into the hands 

[ix] 



Preface 

of those who, with a broader and deeper 
knowledge of human Hfe, must give the 
verdict of its fitness and utility as a form 
of education. 

The writer will never forget the pic- 
ture of a woman who, in 1819^ sought 
education under that wonderful educator, 
Emma Willard. This woman lived to the 
closing decade of the last century, and 
throughout that long life the culture there 
gained, and the inspiration to always seek 
the true and the beautiful, never left her. 
The high ideals acquired there sustained 
her throughout a life of self-denial and 
toil. Is not this the best that education 
can do to elevate and dignify the work 
that lies ready for willing hands, with hope 
blossoming perennially in a sane and 
healthy mind? A few more years will 
complete a century since this woman 
sought and found higher education at the 
Troy Female Seminary. Has coeduca- 
tion anything to offer that will equal it in 



Preface 

results? Is it not the truth that higher 
education for women has fallen back a 
century in utility and fitness, if coeduca- 
tion is to represent its best form? 

This book is offered as a document to 
that great and discriminating public to 
whom must be referred all questions of 
public policy, and upon whose judgments 
coeducation must either stand or fall. 

E. V. DE w. 



[xi] 



WOMAN'S UNFITNESS FOR 
HIGHER COEDUCATION 

CHAPTER I 

The Commercial Element in 
Coeducation 

The commercial character of coeduca- 
tion, considered as a business enterprise, 
cannot be brought against the method as 
such. No pubhc effort, it matters not how 
beneficent, but what has its business side, 
that must be wisely handled and fostered 
that the greatest good may accrue to the 
philanthropic enterprise. When it is 

[1] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

claimed that the idea of coeducation was 
gradually evolved from the necessities of 
the people, that it was a normal develop- 
ment that grew out of the social complex, 
more is claimed for the method than the 
facts justify. 

Oberlin, where the two-sex college orig- 
inated in 1833, was for forty years re- 
garded as an eccentricity. The idea did 
not take root until it was followed in the 
order of events by the State Universities 
of Iowa and Wisconsin, endowed by the 
ancient Government reservation of 1787. 
The great grant of 1862 had but little 
effect on higher education, probably due 
to the disturbance of the Civil War, imtil 
in the early seventies the so-called col- 
leges and universities of the West were 
started under the stimulus of the grant. 
From 1833 until 1870 there was no de- 
mand for the coeducational college. In 
the East, where colleges were endowed, or 
were aided by private gifts, no demand 
[2] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

for the college for both sexes existed at 
all. The conclusion is a fairly reasonable 
one, that the people of neither section was 
clamoring for the coeducational college. 
These colleges were not of normal growth, 
and were not the slow accretion of public 
sentiment in their favor. The method 
was not submitted to a careful test of 
fitness and expediency, but suddenly, by 
a general concurrence of feeling, rather 
than conviction, it sprang into existence 
throughout the West and the great Amer- 
ican experiment was declared a success. 
On the strength of it. Doctor Dewey, in 
his Boston address, made the assertion that 
the West was a generation in advance of 
the East. 

The motive force back of this was 
simply a grant of 10,000,000 acres of land 
rather than the needs of the people for 
coeducation. 

It is not asserted that it is wrong to 
take advantage of this gift, as it was very 

[3] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

properly made to encourage education, but 
it was not made to promote the method of 
education that resulted. The purpose of 
the act of 1862 is expressed in the follow- 
ing preamble : " To teach such branches 
of learning as are related to agriculture 
and the mechanic arts in such manner as 
the Legislatures of the States may re- 
spectively prescribe in order to promote 
the liberal and practical education of the 
industrial classes in the several pursuits 
and professions of life." There was evi- 
dently no intent to found the present 
coeducational college with uncontrolled 
social relations as a coordinate department 
of the training. Young women had a 
right to share in the benefits of the grant. 
The attitude of the promoters of the two- 
sex plan said then, as they say now, if we 
give women separate colleges, or coordi- 
nate institutions, it will cost too much, 
hence the college for both sexes. There 
was money enough for both plans, but 

[4] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

not enough to found colleges and satisfy 
the greed of the political grafter. This 
sacred trust was bandied about between 
the upper millstone of political chicanery 
and the lower of ill-advised and amateur 
educators, without shame and without re- 
morse, so far as known. Enough is 
known to warrant the assertion that if the 
secret history of that grant could be given 
in detail, after each State had received its 
due share, it would form one of the most 
disgraceful records in the political history 
of the West. 

Has the West applied the proceeds of 
the liberal grant wisely? This is what 
President Jordan says about it in his 
Popular Science Monthly article : " It is 
true that untimely zeal of one sort or an- 
other has filled the West with a host of 
so-called colleges. It is true that most 
of these are weak and doing poor work 
in poor ways. It is true that most of 
these are coeducational. It is also true 
[5] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

that a great majority of their students 
are not of the college grade at all. In 
such schools low standards rule, both as 
to scholarship and as to manners. The 
student, fresh from the country, with no 
preparatory training, will bring the man- 
ners of his home. These are not always 
good manners as manners are judged." 
President Jordan ought to know what 
constitutes a good college, with an effi- 
cient faculty and effective equipment in 
libraries and laboratories, of which these 
alleged colleges have none. He ought also 
to be an excellent judge of what is im- 
plied by students of college grade, who 
fail to appear in the student body of these 
institutions. Commercialism cannot be 
carried further in educational enterprise. 
That the people who have been respon- 
sible for this ill-advised effort to realize 
upon an investment are not imconscious 
of their mistake, will appear from the fol- 
lowing extract from Professor Slosson, of 
[6] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

the University of Wyoming; " The other 
charge, that economy was the dominant 
motive in estabhshing coeducation col- 
leges, ought to be prohibited under the 
rules of the Geneva Convention, because 
it inflicts unnecessary suffering. It is not 
only false, but it hurts. Our fathers may 
have been mistaken when they founded 
coeducational colleges, but they were not 
stingy." Why could not Professor Slos- 
son have been consistent as well as gen- 
erous by conceding something to our 
fathers in Congress, who made Wyoming 
University possible in 1862, when, at that 
date, the paternal relation in Wyoming, 
if not unknown, had but little to do with 
coeducation. Business considerations have 
had more influence in founding the college 
for both sexes than any other factor* 
Numerous extracts could be made from 
the literature of the subject, proving that 
the segregation plan, while desirable, was 
too costly to maintain, as it would require 
[7] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

a duplicate equipment. The objection on 
this ground was carried so far as to allow 
young men and women to take the phys- 
ical exercise together, as was the case 
at one time in Chicago University, where 
economy ought not to govern. To the 
rank coeducationist it has always been too 
costly to make coeducation wholesome and 
decent. The commercial spirit has been 
the ruling one in establishing colleges of 
this kind in the East. After the Legis- 
lature passed the enabling act, making 
Ann Arbor a two-sex college, the faculty 
objected to the expense caused by extra 
instructors to meet the demands of women 
students. The women of Michigan raised 
$100,000, and women were admitted. The 
same sum of money was given by women, 
mostly feminine suffragists, to purchase 
the admission of women to the Medical 
School of Johns Hopkins University. 
Half of this sum subsidized the University 
of Rochester, the raising of which, says 
[8] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

Mrs. Harper, nearly cost Miss Susan B. 
Anthony her hfe. Cornell University, 
after being liberally treated by a generous 
benefactor, condescended to admit women. 
The Hst could be extended further, but 
enough has been given to show that good 
business enterprise has underlaid the whole 
superstructure of coeducation. This is not 
written in a captious spirit. Money must 
be had to promote education and its 
growth. But it is stated in order to prove 
that coeducation in the offensive form, 
which is said to be its best expression, did 
not naturally grow out of the necessities 
and demands of the people. That the 
demand for it, and the money which pur- 
chased for it a place, came from the 
women who were exploiting the equal 
suffragist movement. 

The standard of success of a college 

for both sexes is the realization on the 

investment. In other words, the size of 

the class. This measure of success is en- 

[9] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

dorsed by all who have approved the 
method. President Butler says: "From 
1890 - 98 the number of men in coeduca- 
tional colleges increased 70 per cent., while 
in separate colleges for men the number 
increased only 34.7 per cent." In the 
same paragraph he admits that among 
communities well to do, separate colleges 
for women are flourishing, " chiefly for 
social reasons." There are pecuniary 
reasons why the number of young men 
has increased in the mixed college over 
that in the men's colleges. The tuition 
fees in the former are nearly 100 per cent, 
less, while the annual living expenses, 
taken on an average, are 30 per cent. less. 
(Report Commissioner of Education, 
Washington, 1900, p. 1926.) Presidents 
Butler and Jordan, who are presumed to 
be fair men, take no notice of such an 
important factor of growth, but endeavor 
to lead the reader to believe that it is due 
to the general popular approval of the 
[10] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

method itself. Instead, the commercial 
spirit has induced the authorities of these 
institutions to offer the public a cheap 
article in the way of education. Ignoring 
governing conditions, as stated above, the 
coeducationists, with an air of boasting 
hardly credible in sober-minded people, 
call this progress, success, and higher edu- 
cation, based on large classes and cheap 
fees, and the matriculation of half -pre- 
pared boys and girls. 

Against the abandonment of the coedu- 
cation method in favor of segregation or 
coordination, we have the trade spirit pre- 
senting itself in opposition. An ardent 
advocate of the method alludes to the fate 
that overtook Adelbert College, in Cleve- 
land, Ohio. Fourteen years ago this de- 
partment of the Western Reserve Univer- 
sity segregated its classes. Of course, the 
result has been a commercial failure. 
" Adelbert College now rejoices in the 
magnificent number of 206 male students. 

[11] 



WoMAN'^s Unfitness 

The Women's College has 222 students. 
Thus all this special and expensive double 
equipment is maintained, and necessarily 
at a lower standard for each, for two col- 
leges of only 200 students apiece, with the 
sole purpose of preventing the girls from 
coming in competition with the boys in 
class-room work." This bold conclusion 
is given just after the writer had stated 
that both received the same degrees, and 
did the same laboratory work. ( New York 
Sun, August 10, 1902.) If the claim of 
popular approval was justly predicated on 
sound reasoning, we might overlook in- 
discretions such as this, but when it is 
pointed out that the mixed college is com- 
ing nearer to a self-supporting stage than 
the college for a single sex, serious doubts 
arise whether it is education for trade pur- 
poses or for culture's sake. A college that 
hopes to support itself from students' 
fees, or one that strives to do so, ought to 
close its doors in the interests of humanity. 
[12] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

The cost is yearly growing more onerous. 
The laboratories, the libraries, the increas- 
ing corps of instructors and professors, 
make the tuition income of these institu- 
tions appear as nothing by the side of the 
aggregate expense. The true college 
spirit, that signifies serious work, that 
gives up all for culture and training, has 
so enlarged educational equipment, that 
the larger the attendance the greater the 
individual cost ; while in the mixed college 
the larger the attendance the greater the 
profit. A singular feature of the cheap, 
badly equipped mixed college of the 
West, is the misuse of the word univer- 
sity. With resources only large enough 
to maintain a college of low rank for un- 
prepared boys and girls, the university 
name is tacked on without any regard to 
what the word implies. The authorities 
of these institutions cannot possibly be 
ignorant of the scope and aim of a uni- 
versity, and they also must be conscious 
[13] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

of the fact that university rank is im- 
possible to them. There must be a reason 
why this name is so generally misappro- 
priated. Here also the trade spirit has 
left its finger-marks. A supposititious 
rank would appeal to the uneducated boys 
and girls from whom the classes are re- 
cruited. The people at large are ignorant 
of college or university organizations. It 
might safely be left to any farmer or 
mechanic, who has an ambition to have 
his boys and girls receive an education, if 
the name university did not have more 
educational significance than a mere col- 
lege, and if he would not prefer the for- 
mer to the latter. If, as a matter of fact, 
well known to the founders, an alleged 
university is no better than a college, has 
not the name been appropriated as a 
trade-mark in a business enterprise? The 
actual founders of the so-called colleges 
and universities of the West, the Congress 
of 1862, never intended, as the reader al- 
[14] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

ready knows, to found institutions to be 
known by such names. On the contrary, 
they were to be trade and agricultural 
schools, for the benefit of the " industrial 
classes." Legislatures of the States to 
which the grant was allotted had no power 
to act outside the terms of the grant, 
although they were given power to use 
their own discretion, but always within 
the limitations of the law of Congress. 
Under the conditions it is not an unwar- 
ranted conclusion that these institutions 
were created by a misappropriation of 
public money. Had they done better 
with it, the offence might be condoned, 
but with President Jordan's evidence 
as to the character of these institu- 
tions, it is painfully evident that irrep- 
arable wrong has been inflicted upon 
communities that were greatly in need of 
good education. When a commercial 
spirit invades educational matters, it is 
worse than politics. Of the two evils, it 
[15] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

is the lesser one to give up to the grafter 
a percentage on text-books, than to give 
up an entire system of what ought to be 
higher education to an abject spirit of 
trade. It may be objected that a body 
of men capable of uniting together as 
trustees and faculty of a college could 
not be guilty of so prostituting a sacred 
cause. When it is remembered that ten 
years ago scores of medical colleges were 
founded, which were purely private and 
business enterprises, enabled by acts of 
Legislatures to confer M. D. degrees, with 
faculties and boards of trustees always 
made up of the best men of the locality, 
and that these colleges were shams, it be- 
comes less surprising to see the same spirit 
active in the creation of other institutions. 
It may have no special significance, but 
it was in the West that these inefficient 
trade medical colleges were more numer- 
ously exploited. 

It is very noticeable that in coeduca- 
[16] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

tional colleges where the social line is 
strictly drawn, as in Rochester University, 
Middletown, and Cornell, there is a small 
attendance of women students. It is in 
the institutions where the social bars are 
let down that the large aggregation of 
young girls is to be found. It is to be 
hoped that the faculties of these institu- 
tions have ignorantly assumed the truth 
of the fiction that these immature and un-» 
sophisticated people can be safely given 
the social freedom of mature men and 
women. It is a charity to assume that the 
authorities of the mixed college, on such 
a basis, are not taking advantage of one 
of the inherent traits of young girls with 
a view of attracting large classes. One 
of the most alluring sides of a young 
woman's traits is her fondness for the 
society of the other sex. It is but natural 
that a college on the most liberal co-sex 
plan would attract the largest attendance 
of young women, not from any spirit of 
[17] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

wrong-doing, simply in compliance with 
a physiological law. If college author- 
ities are not taking an unfair advantage 
of women, they are at least satisfied with 
the results financially. To satisfy the 
growing distrust of parents and guard- 
ians, they invent the ridiculous claim that 
such social freedom is in itself an educa- 
tion and a wise preparation of the young 
woman for her after-career. Young men 
are also attracted to these colleges for the 
same reason that women are, and, as is 
proudly pointed out, in rapidly increasing 
numbers. It cannot be denied that it is 
good business policy, the result of a liberal 
trade spirit. There is reason to hope for 
better things when it is remembered that 
in the space of ten years the number 
of trade medical colleges was decreased 75 
per cent, as the result of public opinion. 

Higher coeducation now means speed, 
not culture. It is the outcome of the in- 
tensifying nature of the national life, 
[18] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

which finds its most characteristic expres- 
sion in the ruhng commercial spirit. It 
may be a sad thing to say to those who 
reverence learning for its own sake, that 
the most typical form of this spirit 
is found in higher education. There is 
hardly a trace of it in primary and second- 
ary education, unless it be in the more 
than liberal expenditure of money on the 
part of municipalities and States to edu- 
cate the children and youths. This is an 
education for citizenship, and not for cul- 
ture. It is in higher education that the 
dominant business animus rules both the 
methods and the results. It is made cheap, 
but price is nothing without speed. It is 
business with the same meaning that gives 
to the shipper a better freight rate from 
Omaha to New York than from Buffalo 
to New York. It is the long haul as 
against the short haul in education as in 
trade. Harvard University already allows 
its students to specialize in the direction of 
[19] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

professional work, and thus cut out a 
year from their hberal training. The 
senior year, during which so many young 
men learn to find themselves, counts for 
nothing if he can save one year out of 
eight in his total educational work. What 
Harvard does, many other colleges will do, 
also. How many students has this pet 
scheme of President Eliot's drawn away 
from other institutions? It is very likely 
that he was not conscious of it, but he was 
catering to the lowest form of the trade 
motive, as we know it, in education. 

By viewing the extreme forms of coed- 
ucation as business enterprises, an expla- 
nation is furnished of many things that are 
difficult to understand. These institutions 
are, almost without exception, denomina- 
tional in character and control. They 
stand for education as far as their means 
will allow, but they must exploit the tenets 
of the religious bodies that founded them. 
The central idea seems to be to educate 
[20] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

young men for the pastorate in these so- 
cieties. This is well; it is too early in the 
twentieth century to separate religion and 
higher education. It is better to combine 
religion with the humanities, than not to 
have it at all. But it is religion at a price. 
Higher education must be animated by a 
simple purpose ; it cannot be made to serve 
two masters, and to serve both with profit. 
Whicji pays the price will depend upon the 
proselyting energies of the religious 
founders. If they 'demand more of reli- 
gion than they do of education, the latter is 
reduced to a minimum. It recalls to mind 
the affair of Vanderbilt University, where 
ihe professor of geology was made to 
resign on account of a little book which 
he had written, entitled "The Pre-Ad- 
amite Man." The trustees imagined that 
it differed slightly from the Mosaic ac- 
count of the creation. This is not an ex- 
treme case. Professor Haeckel teaches at 
Jena because the clergy at Berlin would 
[21] 



WoMAK^s Unfitness 

interfere with his freedom of investiga- 
tion and teaching. This is commonly 
called intolerance on the part of college 
faculties. It is good business practice not 
to antagonize any of the sectarian societies 
that the college may represent. That relig- 
ion should be an agent to reduce a col- 
lege from a purely educational status to 
a business enterprise, is a matter of serious 
regret, but when it goes further, and 
allows business considerations to dictate 
the method and kind of instruction, the 
freedom and liberality of education in de- 
nominational colleges are placed in jeop- 
ardy. 

The independence that ensures the truth 
and liberality of education is less evident 
in the mixed college. Women are more 
passive in religious matters than men. It 
is doubtful if the action of the trustees 
at Vanderbilt University would have been 
tolerated in Eastern colleges for men by 
the student body. A coeducational college 
[22] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

could be handled much more easily in 
prompting the business interest of secta- 
rianism than a college for men only. Col- 
leges of this type have a double burden of 
commercialism, not the least of which is 
given to increasing the influence of the 
religious body which it represents. There 
will be no reform in this direction until 
the State takes charge of higher educa- 
tion, just as it has in primary instruction 
in behalf of all the people. Something 
may be said of the direct bearing of the 
trade spirit in lessening the opportunities 
of women for education in colleges for 
both sexes. Sound methods of instruction 
ought to allow women the benefit of pro- 
fessors of her own sex, if the eternal fit- 
ness of things is to be respected. Women | 
stand on a higher plane than men do as \ 
instructors. In colleges for women they 
have proven their fitness as instructors. 
In the coeducation college she is given 
scant recognition. A tabulation of the sex 
[23] 



Woman's Unfitness 

of professors in colleges and universities 
is almost barren of women. Taking 
Table 29 of the Report of the Bureau of 
Education at Washington for the years 
1899 - 1900, at random among 46 colleges, 
5 of which are for men, there are 600 
men professors and instructors, and 57 
women in like positions. This is the fair- 
ness shown to women on the part of men 
who do not hesitate to claim that their 
method is the only one that gives to women 
a privilege equal to men in education. 
There can be no question that the woman 
professor can get in closer touch with the 
young women students, both in sympathy 
and instruction, than the male professor. 
If there was a fair division of the chairs 
in colleges where there is an attendance 
of 500 to 1,200 women students, the gross 
social license that has disgraced many col- 
leges could not have occurred. Women 
professors are not given a place in these 
colleges, for the reason that young men 
[24] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

would find the instruction of women pro- 
fessors irksome, and would leave for insti- 
tutions where men professors are em- 
ployed. It is good trade policy, which the 
authorities of these institutions would re- 
gard as hardship to defend. The question 
is a reasonable one, in view of the facts, 
does not coeducation cheapen the policy 
of the college in the matter of instructors ? 
This cheapening of education is taking 
an unfair advantage of women, it is dis- 
posing of them at the least possible cost, 
and giving them the least possible oppor- 
tunities, after bestowing upon them an 
alleged education of the higher kind. It 
would cost money to give young women 
professors whom the college could not 
make useful with men. 

One more matter that concerns the 
commercial idea in the mixed college, is 
the gift of scholarships for women in col- 
leges for both sexes. In Table 30 of the 
report referred to, and leaving out the 
[25] 



Woman'^s Unfitness 

University of Chicago, the Northwestern 
University, and the University of lUinois, 
there are only 106 scholarships, for any 
of which women have no more rights than 
men. Women attend college with as many 
personal hardships as men, and with many 
less opportunities to earn money. Out of 
that scant number of scholarships, you can 
count upon the fingers of one hand those 
given in aid of women students. She is 
educated as cheaply, and given as little 
help as possible during her student life, 
denied all chance for position in her alma 
mater, and turned out upon the world as 
a sort of by-product in the education of 
men. She contributes 34 per cent, toward 
the total expense of the institution by her 
tuition, in return for which she receives 
an education of doubtful utility and un- 
certain culture, because it would cost too 
much money to give her more. 



[26] 



CHAPTER II 

The Literature of Coeducation 

We have only two criteria by which 
we may estimate the honesty of men, 
namely, by what they say, and by what 
they do. Simple as this standard is, by it 
we may often pierce to the hinterland of 
act and motive. Apply this measure to 
the public statement of those who are in 
favor of the education of the sexes in 
mixed colleges, we find a mass of so-called 
literature unique as emanating from men 
whom by courtesy we must call educated. 
It is of such a character that it forms a 
serious indictment of the sincerity of its 
authors. They seem to have made a fetich 
of coeducation, and, like a jungle priest, 
[27] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

fly into a rage when its right is questioned. 
A man who is sincere in his convictions, 
who beheves that he is on secure ground, 
welcomes a discussion of his postulate. 
Not so the coeducationist. He is intolerant 
^/land abusive. He treats a serious social 
problem with levity, and with what he 
evidently believes to be wit. He forgets 
that this is not an age of intolerance, but 
that of free discussion. He is misplaced 
in the order of time, and is generations 
behind the spirit of free thought and in- 
terrogation that environ him; he repu- 
diates the first, and resents the latter. He 
claims supremacy in deciding a great 
question of sociology. He tries to obliter- 
ate the laws of human life, and calls it 
progress. And yet, his aim is to secure 
the happiness and efficiency of an army 
of men and women, and he asserts his 
, ability to do this by a common education 
I in an atmosphere of the closest social rela- 
tions. Touching this, his best claim to 
[28] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

respectability is the fact that he forgets. 
Humanity cannot be made happier by 
being ground down into a mjass by the 
same machinery, neither can men and 
women be given the same point of view, 
the same interests, by social relations, how- 
ever intimate, on the basis of a common 
education. The coeducationist forgets 
that men and women are at opposite poles 
in the ellipse of natural law, that they 
touch only on the periphery of thought 
and emotion, and that they are merely 
gyrating human atoms about the central 
pivot of sex, differentiated by laws of 
growth, maturity, and intellection that are 
growing stronger as our modern civiliza- 
tion gives individuality and intensity to 
life. 

It would be amusing, if it were not dis- 
gusting, to give at length some of the 
many notable examples of irony and sar- 
casm, mixed with a peculiar form of wit 
as misplaced as hilarity at a funeral, flung 
[29] 



Womak'^s Unfitness 

at the opponents of coeducation. A few 
examples must suffice. A first place in 
this style of argument must be given to 
President Butler, of Columbia University. 
In an article in Collier's Weekly, for June 
2, 1902, " It would need the pen of 
Swift," he says, " to portray the absurd- 
ities of those who resist the movement to 
open wide to women opportunities for 
higher education." This quotation gives 
point to another method of impaling their 
adversaries on a point of false logic. If 
you are opposed to coeducation, you are 
opposed to the higher education of women. 
The ridiculous charge is at all times 
brought against those who only ask for 
sane methods in education, and for an 
even chance for woman as against man. 
It is manly and honorable, however, from 
their standpoint, to falsely charge a wrong 
motive to any one who opposes you. Pres- 
ident Butler continues: " They are quite 
beyond Dooley's reach. One who is blessed 
[30] 



/ 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

with a sense of humor, even in modest pro- 
portions, is unable to treat these argu- 
ments seriously." The narrow strip of 
States lying along the Atlantic seaboard 
" is about as provincial as Honduras." 
The ordinary relations between men and 
women he stigmatizes with rare judgment 
as " artificial and absurd." The only con- 
ceivable association with the other sex are 
those of love and marriage, " anything 
else is bad form, or distinctly suspicious; 
this seems to me utterly absurd, and that 
it is fraught with danger, every one 
knows." It would be better for President 
Butler to speak for himself, but it would 
have been still better, before writing this 
last sentence, to have consulted some good 
and wise female relative. What he says 
about society here is false, and one cannot 
resist the conviction that he knew it to be 
false, and invented it to point his argu- 
ment. When he strikes a serious vein, it 
is to wave the whole matter of " solemn 
[31] 



WoMAK^s Unfitness 

arguments " against coeducation out of 
court with a high-handed flourish. " But 
really," he says, " these are all dead issues. 
The American people have settled the 
matter." This settlement is peculiar, and 
forms one of the conclusive arguments 
resorted to by all the friends of coeduca- 
tion. " Fifteen millions of children in ele- 
mentary schools are all being coeducated." 
Because we may practically say that all 
children attend primary schools and live 
at home, therefore the great American 
people have settled the fitness and utility 
of herding young men and women to- 
gether in mixed colleges, where they live 
in unrestrained social relations, and which 
our diplomatic president says " is the f am-^ 
ily, the natural type." There is space for 
but one other selection from the effort of 
President Butler. After saying that 
higher education for women, apart from 
men, is disappointing, and stating with 
fine irony that his mind will be weakened 
[32] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

and his vitality sapped through teaching 
women, " he takes rank with the advocates 
of the Baconian authorship of Shake- 
speare's plays," concluding abruptly in 
a manner that, following the hilarity of 
the article, appears ludicrously solemn. 
" Meanwhile, it is very proper to re- 
mark in conclusion that the Columbia's 
plan of the separation of men and women 
during the undergraduate course, with 
equal opportunities for them, and a com- 
mon opportunity in graduate work, meets 
admirably our social and industrial needs 
and conditions." This is not coeducation 
in any sense in which the word is used 
in this book, nor in any sense made use 
of by President Butler. In the light 
of the concluding paragraph, can any 
one understand why he wrote that arti- 
cle, and why he infused into it the tone 
and spirit that it shows? President Butler 
has been given more space than he was 
entitled to by the merits of his article, be- 
[33] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

cause he so completely epitomizes the stock 
arguments of all who favor the coeduca- 
tional idea, and his style of presenting the 
subject is an excellent example of the 
method. 

Another author who has contributed to 
the literature of the subject, is President 
Jordan, of Leland Stanford University. 
He aims to be learned and philosophical 
where President Butler was frivolous and 
jocular, but they stand in one respect 
upon common ground, as neither has the 
courage of his convictions. Several refer- 
ences have already been made to his Pop- 
ular Science Monthly article, but he is 
called up here as a witness for the indict- 
ment brought against the advocates of 
what they are pleased to call the American 
idea. After a long statement of plati- 
tudes which were never disputed, he then 
draws a picture of a mythical college 
which is to meet the " varied needs of 
varied men," which is to be the future 
[34] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

college for both sexes in common. Where 
such a college is located he omits to inform 
us, but it is not the Stanford Junior Uni- 
versity. On the whole, he talks in a very 
sane way on the modern college, and it 
is not until he touches upon the question 
at issue that he allows the prevailing flip- 
pant manner to intrude. " Shall women 
be taught in the same classes as men? " 
he asks, and answers that it "is a matter 
of taste or personal preference. It does 
no harm whatever to either men or women 
to meet those of the other sex in the same 
class-room. But if they prefer not to do 
so, let them do otherwise. No harm is 
done in either case, nor has the matter 
more then secondary importance." If co- 
education can survive a blow like that it 
has a large amount of reserve vitality, but 
this appearance of indifference to the 
burning question that is agitating hun- 
dreds of colleges, real or putative, appears 
to result from his low opinion of educated 
[85] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

women. " She may know a good deal," 
he says, " but she can do nothing." If 
women are educated alone, the " tendency 
is toward beauty and order, while men . 
have this obscured by the realities; but 
educated together, the women confer 
beauty and order upon the men, while the 
latter give beauty and fitness to the 
women. There is less of silliness and 
folly where man is not a novelty." Again 
he says, " that in coeducational institu- 
tions of high standards frivolous conduct 
or scandals of any form are rarely 
known," and yet on the very next page 
he tells us of the evils and scandals that re- 
sult because women are not lodged in dor- 
mitories, but with fine distinction he states 
" that this is not to be charged to coeduca- 
tion." He forgets that there is not a pop- 
ular college for both sexes in the country 
that can give dormitory accommodation 
for but a small part of the women stu- 
dents. President Jordan's statements have 
[36] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

been freely quoted elsewhere, to which the 
reader is referred, but enough has been 
given to show the tendency toward rash 
assertion and indifference to facts, and the 
prevailing tone of flippancy that mars and 
weakens all that is said by the advocates 
of coeducation. All things considered, 
President Jordan has written the best 
paper upon the subject that has yet ap- 
peared. 

There appeared in two recent numbers 
of the Independent an article by Mr. 
Henry T. Finck, on " Why Coeducation 
is Losing Ground." His position was 
fairly stated, his facts were unassailable, 
w^hile its tone was moderate. It was 
highly proper that an article of this char- 
acter should elicit a reply. This was made 
by Prof. E. E. Slosson, of the University 
of Wyoming, and appeared in the same 
number of the Independent. The reply 
was in the prevailing type. When he 
failed to give his argument validity by his 
[37] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

facts, he endeavored to give it vitality by 
his sarcasm. He began the discussion of 
such a serious subject in this way, and it 
is so very characteristic that it deserves to 
be given in full: " The most immoral act 
I ever committed, so far as known to the 
public, was to take a seat on the left of 
the aisle in an Eastern country church. It 
was the women's side. The reason I call 
it my most immoral act was not because 
of my motive, for I had none, but because 
nothing I have ever done before or since 
has caused such horror in the minds of the 
righteous, such sneers on the part of the 
ungodly, and such pain to my friends." 
As an opening for a paper upon a subject 
of vital importance, this stands unequalled 
for irrelevancy and unfitness. Its motive 
is evident, to heap ridicule upon the author 
who ventures to question the system of 
coeducation, while at the same time he 
could pose as a man of infinite wit among 
the applauding readers of Wyoming Uni- 
[38] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

versity. He is not satisfied to exhibit wit, 
but he must also indulge in paradoxes, if 
we may so mildly designate a denial of 
physiological truths, as well as the con- 
clusions of experience. "Segregation of 
the sexes in coeducation heightens sex con- 
sciousness and " stimulates the sex idea." 
Colleges for men are called monastic in- 
stitutions, and he makes no charges about 
the morals of the men there, because he 
" knows too much about them." It is not 
necessary to treat Professor Slosson se- 
riously, and, like the others, whom we have 
so far quoted, it is brought forward only 
to show the animus displayed by the coed- 
ucationists. 

The most intolerant and vituperative 
reply brought out by Mr. Finck's article 
was from the one who is not an educator, 
Mrs. Harper, who edits, or writes, a col- 
umn or two in the Sunday edition of the 
New York Sun. Her reply is not worth 
quoting, as it contains no argument 
[39] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

against Mr. Finck's contention, but is 
made up of abuse of all who oppose the 
mixed college, and of that author in par- 
ticular, who was roundly abused for a 
couple of books he had written, and which 
appeared especially to rouse her ire. If 
there is any truth or justice in the theory 
of coeducation, it can never be brought 
out by the methods of argument followed 
by its adherents. Let them eliminate the 
tendency to rash assertion of facts of 
which they oif er no proof, let them once 
for all come to the modest conclusion that 
their mere opinion has no value in an 
argument upon a question of sociology, 
and exhibit the manners of gentlemen, and 
there may be hope that the truth will be 
reached. When you are contending with 
men who use their style of argument, the 
only way is to turn against them their 
own weapons. This want of tolerance 
savors of medisevalism, and crops out in 
the most unexpected places. Surely the 
[40] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

discussion held by the Association of Col- 
leges of the Middle States, published in 
the Regents' Report for 1901, must have 
had something in it worthy of serious con- 
sideration, and yet Dean Smalley, of 
Syracuse University, an able and con- 
scientious educator, says that it had " some 
nonsense on coeducation." As long as the 
subject is treated in this way, it will pro- 
voke hostile discussion. There is not a 
man who has approached the subject from 
the opposite point of view who has not 
been actuated by a spirit of fairness, and 
the sole desire to seek the truth. This 
frivolous attitude of its defenders, the 
jeering, scandalizing comments of the 
press, have deprived coeducation of all 
dignity. It appears like education in bur- 
lesque, a comedy of errors, with the actors 
dressed in cap and gown. 

It is difficult to keep the advocates of 
coeducation in colleges for men and 
women down to the main question. Co- 
[41] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

education is always traced to the primary 
school, then to the secondary school, and 
finally to the college. No writer who has 
ever opposed the latter form of coeduca- 
tion had an idea of offering any argument 
against children being taught together in 
primary schools. In the secondary schools, 
in which the student averages the age of 
fifteen years, hardly any objection can 
be raised, although in quite a number of 
cities, especially in the South, they are 
separated. In the primary school the sex 
problem, of course, never obtrudes. 
Among the older students in secondary 
schools, if the boys and girls were given 
the same uncontrolled social privileges that 
they have in mixed colleges, the same ir- 
regularities would exist. The boys and 
girls are, however, under home influences 
and control. This it is that keeps the 
school wholesome and free from moral 
contamination, and it is the absence of 
the home control that forms the storm cen- 
[42] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

tre in large mixed colleges, and that caused 
the revolution in the relation of the faculty 
to the women students in Syracuse Uni- 
versity. 

In the report of the Commissioner of 
Education for the United States for 
1901 - 02, there is an extensive chapter 
devoted to coeducation. It certainly needed 
editing by the official compiler. In Boston 
a special committee made a divided report 
on coeducation. The majority report, 
signed by J. P. C. Winship and Emily A. 
Fifield, offers some remarkable instances 
of logic. We do no injustice to the authors 
in separating the following extracts from 
their context. ^ A man tells a rough story 
in a smoking-car because " there are no 
women here," therefore, educate boys 
and men with girls and women, and the 
refining influence represses and subdues 
the rough and gross nature in young men. 
We wonder if that is so. The low estimate 
that coeducationists place upon our young 
[43] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

men exists to such an extent that it forms 
a feature of its so-called literature. How 
they account for the existence of the 
American gentleman, young or old, before 
coeducation was ever dreamed of, is a 
minor matter not deserving of explana- 
tion. "If it is right," says this extraor- 
dinary report, " for brothers and sisters to 
live in the same house and eat at the same 
table, then it is right for them to be edu- 
cated together. Let them be brought up 
separately, and if they meet only clandes- 
tinely, great harm is likely to result." 
Surely the reader will pardon the ques- 
tion, where did this man and woman get 
their experience of life ? But the worst is 
yet to come. " If wedlock is right and 
proper, then coeducation is right and 
proper. If men and women are to marry, 
they should know each other summer and 
winter before marriage, and the more they 
know of each other the less likely will 
divorce result." One other extract, in 
[44] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

order to show the high-handed style of 
treating all who oppose the method, by 
people who have become case-hardened to 
the coeducational idea. The majority 
made an enrolment of all teachers for and 
against attendance in mixed schools. Of 
the results of this tabulation, they say: 
" Of the 254 teachers opposed to coeduca- 
tion, 122 are teachers of girls alone, and 
109 instructors of boys only. They may 
be considered eoc jmrte in their views, and 
should be ruled out." We will say nothing 
about the peculiar grammar of this quota- 
tion, and only call attention to the result: 
as all who voted in opposition did so in obe- 
dience to their convictions, their vote was 
recommended for rejection; the result of 
the voting, therefore, was unanimously in 
favor. As the minority report is evidently 
^'^ eoc parte/^ we rule it out. 

A considerable number of excerpts 
from the reports of foreign teachers, 
delegates to the Chicago Educational 
[45] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

Congress in 1893, are given in the United 
States report. — Leaving out all ref- 
erences to common and secondary schools, 
one of these reports, being from a lady, 
Mile. Marie Dugard, is well worth quot- 
ing in part. " From the moral stand- 
point, the consequences are still more 
dangerous. It is a law that if two individ- 
uals live together, the one who has the 
strongest personality becomes the model of 
the other. Finally, it is impossible that 
between young men and young women, 
associated every day in the familiarity of 
classes, there should not be formed some 
romances, which the American education, 
it is true, renders inoffensive so far as 
regard manners, but which will neverthe- 
less have disadvantages. These objections 
seem judicious, and in the light of them 
it seems that coeducation ought to be 
abandoned."^ Prof . Emil Hausknecht, of 
Berlin, says in the same report: "As a 
makeshift, coeducation is better than noth- 
[46] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

ing — as a principle, it entirely ignores 
the needs of the separate sexes." In his 
book entitled " American Traits," Prof. 
Hugo Munsterberg, in a summary which 
is especially fair and reserved, writes of 
the effemination of college training. 
" The whole situation here militates 
against the home and against the mascu- ^ 
line of higher education, and seems to me, 
therefore, antagonistic to the health of 
the nation. . . . Coeducation means only 
equality; but the so-called higher educa- 
tion for girls means, under the conditions 
of American life to-day, decidedly not the 
equality, but the superiority of women. 
. . . The woman who studies medicine or 
natural science, music or painting, perhaps 
even law or divinity, can we affront her ^^ 
with the suggestion, which would be an 
insult to the man, that all her work is so 
superficial that she will not care for its 
continuation as soon as she undertakes the 
duties of a married woman? Or ought 
[47] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

we to imply that she is so conceited as to 
believe that she is able to do what no man 
would dare hope for himself; that is, to 
combine the professional duties of the man 
with the not less complex duties of the 
woman? She knows that the intensity of 
her special interest must suffer, and that 
her work must become a superficial side 
interest." 

In the further examination of the report 
of the Bureau of Education at Washing- 
ton, which, by the way, is a coeducational 
document, rather unfair measures are re- 
sorted to to prop up the cause. The boast 
is frequently made that the American idea 
is spreading to foreign universities and 
colleges ; concerning this, the report states : 
" At Oxford, women are admitted to the 
lectures of about 120 professors, readers, 
and lecturers in the university. They are 
also admitted to the examinations for 
B. A., but are not eligible to the university 
degrees. Substantially the same arrange- 
[48] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

ments have been made at Cambridge. 
Women are admitted on the same terms 
as men to Durham University, and are 
ehgible to all the degrees excepting those 
in divinity. Victoria University grants 
degrees on the same terms as men. In the 
University of Wales, women have the 
same privileges as men. The University 
College, established in England since 1868, 
is open to men and women. By the Uni- 
versities Act of 1889, the Scotch univer- 
sities were authorized to open their doors 
to women. Edinburg admits them to the 
classes with men. Glasgow has affiliated 
Queen Margaret College for women, and, 
more recently (1895), opened all lectures 
in the faculty of arts to women. The 
University of Dundee, affiliated to St. 
Andrew's, is coeducational. Women are 
admitted to all the privileges of the 
Royal University of Ireland. Trinity 
College, Dublin, does not admit women, 
but special examinations for women out- 
[49] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

side the course for students of the college 
were established about twenty-five years 
ago, and are still continued." The con- 
tention of this extract is manifest, that is^ 
that coeducation, as we understand the 
term in the United States, is finding a 
foothold in conservative England, and is 
intentionally misleading. Coeducation, 
with its untrammelled social relation of 
i/i- the sexes, as exists in Northwestern and 
Chicago University, and as it formerly 
existed at Syracuse, could not live an hour 
in England. As a matter of fact, coedu- 
cation on the Oberlin plan has made no 
progress in England, or the Colonies. 
In England, University College has a 
woman's department. King's College also 
has a woman's department. Lady Mar- 
garet, Somerville, and St. Hilda, at 
Oxford, are for women. In Wales, there 
are Alexandria Hall, at Aberystwyth, and 
Aberdere Hall, at Cardiff, as distinct 
from the parent institution as are Rad- 
[50] 



FOE Higher Coeducation 

clifFe, at Harvard, and Barnard, at 
Columbia. Glasgow has affiliated Queen 
Margaret College for women, and is not 
coeducational. In Germany, the college 
as it is known here does not exist, its func- 
tion being confined to the gymnasia, to 
which women are not admitted. German 
universities confine their degree work to 
the learned profession, law, medicine, 
divinity, and to a course of philosophy. 
The Technische Hochschules are coordi- 
nate in rank with the universities, and give 
practical professional training, except in 
the learned professions. Women are ad- 
mitted to examinations for degrees in 
many of the universities, but are not al- 
lowed to matriculate, and are simply 
hearers by courtesy. They thus form no 
part of the student body. In France, the 
prevailing conditions are but little better 
in favor of women, their university no 
better. In 1898 there were 871 women en- 
rolled as attending French universities, in 
[51] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

a total of 28,782. In medicine there were 
469, science 80, letters 262, and in phar- 
macy 55. For the same year (1898) there 
were only 16 doctorates in medicine and 3 
diplomas in pharmacy bestowed. In spite 
of all this, in nearly every article that is 
written the statement is made that coed- 
ucation is making rapid progress abroad, 
and the public which they address be- 
lieves it. 

An interesting feature of the more re- 
cent literature of coeducation, is the plan 
of segregate, or coordinate, education. 
These are advocated as a remedy for the 
evils that the system has gradually led up 
to. Both are as strenuously battled against 
as is the plan to abolish the method en- 
tirely. President C. F. Thwing, in his 
book, " The College Woman," extracts 
from which are given place in the report 
of the Bureau, " Coordination," he says, 
" represents a college for men as part of 
a university, and a college for women as 
[52] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

part of a university, each able to exist 
without the other, both united in loyalty 
to the same ideals. Coordinate education 
is not coeducation, for the men and women 
do not recite in the same class. It pro- 
motes a very sane health. It does not 
tempt to love giving or love receiving any 
more than humanity itself. It is a method 
more easy to administer than coeducation. 
The students are not brought into relations 
so intimate that even the wisest parents 
can ask questions of anxiety." It is an 
anomaly in education that the sex relation 
referred to by President Thwing is just 
what the hard-shell coeducationist does 
want. The humanizing, cultivating influ- 
ence of the " cultured " young girl of 
eighteen on the education of men cannot 
be given up. She is an essential feature 
of the method. In this " cultured " so- 
ciety too great intimacy cannot exist, and, 
if marriage takes place, and the more the 
better, as President Jordan says, what can 
[53] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

be so good as a cultured young man, 
whom we may term the by-product of the 
method? 

Brown University has begun the method 
of coordinate education, and is counted by 
Doctor Harris, in his Bureau report, as a 
coeducational college, which called forth 
a protest from President Faunce. The 
work at Brown does away with one ob- 
jection raised against the coordinate sys- 
tem, namely, its expense. " While this 
establishment," the president says, " makes 
no drain whatever upon the University's 
financial resources, it adds greatly to its 
popularity and favor with the commu- 
nity." Coordination, when established as 
a part of a college for men, elicits no pro- 
test on the part of coeducation advocates, 
but when it is proposed to introduce it into 
institutions for both sexes, where the " cul- 
ture " theory has hitherto flourished, it 
rouses a storm of indignant protest. 

The same may be said of the proposed 
[54] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

segregation plan for Chicago University, 
an idea which has taken root also in North- 
western University, according to recent 
despatches of the Associated Press. These 
changes in the two great institutions of 
the Middle West may be regarded as san- 
itary measures to improve education and 
clear the moral atmosphere, as clearly 
needed in college life as in an effort to 
abate the smoke nuisance in Chicago. 
Against this, newspaper attacks are made, 
of a character only equalled by the slum 
politics. The reader already knows some- 
thing of the aim of coordination in educa-» 
tion. Is there anything about it to solicit 
the following intemperate attack from 
Mrs. Harper, in the easy columns of the 
New York Sun? " Is the sex line to be 
drawn at Chicago University? After ten 
years of enjoyment of its splendid privi- 
leges, are women to be set aside in an 
' annex,' and subjected to all the limita- 
tions which are endured by the women of 
[55] 



Woman's Unfitness 

other colleges where coordinate education 
prevails? These are the things which the 
people of this country have a right to 
protest. Has Doctor Harper hypnotized 
Mr. Rockefeller, that he consents to this? 
. . . One of the greatest experiments ever 
made has heen in progress at Chicago 
University, and it has been watched by the 
educators of the world. President Harper 
proposes to declare this practically a fail- 
ure. Such action will be a calamity from 
which it will require a generation to re- 
cover. There should be a quick and unan- 
imous protest from every newspaper and 
every man and every woman of influence." 
( New York Sun, July 6, 1902. ) The con- 
cluding sentence of this quotation demon- 
strates that Mrs. Harper lacks sanity on 
this subject. All people must think as she 
does. All newspapers do not advocate 
coeducation, and most men and women of 
influence send their daughters to colleges 
for women. Again she says: "It is 
[56] 



FOR Higher Coeducatio 



N 



sought to do this unjust thing, not by pre- 
senting openly the objection to the present 
system, and permitting a full and free 
discussion, but by the party machine 
method of coercing voters, juggling bal- 
lots, taking advantage of absentees, to 
secure majorities, and other devious ways 
of the politician." This would be very 
wrong if it were true, but it is not true. 
Again, she winds up with the crescendo: 
" Against this most retrogressive action let 
there be emphatic protest by the press, by 
individuals, and by organizations of men 
and women throughout the country." 
(New York Sun, September 28, 1902.) 
If there can be anything finer than this 
in the way of a quiet, philosophical dis- 
cussion of a great problem in education, 
research has failed to discover it. 

The most aggressive advocates are the 

women suffragists. This movement has 

been the fostering agent of the corelation 

of the sexes in college education. This, at 

[57] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

least, is true of the method in the East. 
In the West and Middle West, peculiar 
social conditions favored the growth of 
the idea. In the East, the plan of cam- 
paign on the part of the suffragists has 
been a stupid abuse of men; on a parity, 
their method of advancing the cause of 
coeducation has been an equal abuse of 
any one who opposed it. The motive of 
the women suif ragists, admitting that they 
have any, must be a mixed one. On the 
one hand, they hope to gain an additional 
political asset with which to discount the 
future, and, on the other hand, to make 
a marked impression by the alleged ex- 
cessive brightness and receptive quaUties 
of women over men in their studies. The 
latter is no doubt true, as relates to 
young woman from eighteen to twenty- 
two years of age, but this disappears as 
maturity places men and women on a com- 
mon level. Industrial feminism has re- 
ceived but little attention from the suf- 
[58] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

fragists, who have concentrated on the 
woman student, and only on the student 
as she takes part in a mixed college, the 
interest that ought to have been extended 
to women in the many relations of impor- 
tance which she bears to the great modern 
movement of industrial feminism. Here 
she is gaining her greatest victories in the 
wide domain of the industries, and gains 
them with modest assurance, in which co- 
education and woman's suffrage take no 
part. This, the future will show to be true 
coeducation ; in the ever widening univer- 
sity of practical life, where skill of hand 
and the trained mind will make woman 
man's coworker, share and share alike, co- 
education must open the door to woman. 
It must make easy and ensure success for 
her in what is difficult for the sister who 
is not coeducated. But coeducation has 
not yet stood this test. There is an entire 
absence of evidence to prove that, in the 
active competition of life, young women, 
[59] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

the product of mixed colleges, have any 
^ advantage over other women. The coedu- 
cationists make no claim in this direction; 
there are too many facts against it viewed 
from this standpoint. The only claims the 
women suffragists make, are that women 
are entitled to the same kind and degree 
of education that men are receiving, with- 
J out reference to occupation, and that edu- 

cation of the coeducational kind will better 
fit her for the duties of a wife and mother. 
Concerning this latter contention, there are 
no facts obtainable from the vast army of 
wives and mothers. That, however, is of 
no consequence ; it is stated with the force 
of a self-evident proposition, in which all 
are to place their belief. If there is any- 
thing in the license permitted in the un- 
controlled relations of the sexes to fit a 
woman for wifehood, the history of these 
young women has failed to reveal it, or, if 
to bring to the side of the cradle an intelli- 
gence trained on this model offers any 
[60] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

advantages over instinctive motherhood, it 
also has yet to be proven. 

The relation of women to the industries 
is not indebted to college education ; on the 
contrary, the great common school system 
of the country, which, during the past fifty 
years, has been given broader scope and a 
more practical direction, is what has 
opened the door to industrial feminism in 
America, as contrasted with the social 
feminism of Germany, with Madame 
Husson as its exponent. In England, 
where it is a gospel of discontent, or in 
Sweden, where Ibsen is its prophet. This 
is called the " emancipation of women," 
and this is the ground held by the women 
suffragists. There is no word as to the 
betterment of woman labor conditions. 
On the contrary, she is simply regarded 
individually as a political unit, from whom 
her natural prerogatives have been with- 
held. " And all women will know in time," 
says an illogical advocate of " equal 
[61] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

rights," " what many of them realize now, 
that their Government has not fulfilled its 
whole duty in simply permitting them to 
make a living." When did Government, 
State or national, ever assume any right 
to " permit " women to make a living? 
Absurdities like this must not be allowed 
to interrupt the even flow of the remark- 
able argument; "but that justice de- 
mands," she continues, " that it should give 
them, in addition, a voice in the councils 
and a part in its administrations. The 
State itself will eventually have sufficient 
confidence in the judgment, ability, and 
patriotism of its women to acknowledge 
fully their value and their necessity in 
public affairs." (New York Sun, July 5, 
1903.) This social feminism, the gospel 
of decadence, that is disturbing Europe 
and filling it with a literature of revolt 
and discontent, is not that woman may find 
wider fields for her industrial efforts, but 
for her to throw off the shackles of social 
[62] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

restraints, and secure in their place her 
emancipation from marriage and all that 
it implies. If coeducation is not to secure 
for women a broader field of usefulness, 
then, under the decadent teaching of the 
women suffragists, she will be expected to 
join in the cry of revolt against the crime 
of marriage and maternity without her 
consent. 

The future for women, the healthy, con- 
tented future, all depends on the material 
side, that inevitably tends to release 
woman from her dependence on man. 
This must not only be relative, but it must 
be absolute and general, in order to give 
her a freedom of choice as to what her 
relations with man may be. If she be 
self-supporting and contented with her 
lot, she marries from choice, with no neces- 
sity to wait for a possible marriage which 
may never come. She will be under no 
necessity to become a place-hunter from 
a political majority, which, unless women 
[63] 



Woman'^s Unfitness 

possess a moral fibre to which men are 
strangers, will make of her a social im- 
possibility. What is there in coeducation 
to impart to woman her ability to keep her 
future in her own hands? That is to 
broaden, not her capacity to vote and to 
seek office, but to secure for her a fair 
share of the right and ability to work. 
That is to increase her effectiveness by 
the side of man that alone will secure to 
her an equal share of compensation. 

To the great and final test of coeduca- 
tion in mixed colleges, that of fitness for 
work, the literature of the subject gives 
no clue. Unsupported assertions are 
made, but no proof given. It would nat- 
urally occur to one that, if the advocates 
of the method believe it to be necessary 
to say what they do, and in a way which 
they evidently regard as striking and con- 
vincing, they would also see the need of 
offering some evidence that would bring 
conviction to thinking people. 
[64] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

It would be a simple matter to keep in 
touch with their women graduates, and 
tabulate their occupations and earning 
capacities. The majority of women grad- 
uates of mixed colleges who have to seek a 
vocation enter the teaching profession. A 
contributor to the New York Sun of Jan- 
uary 11,1903, Mrs. Harper, is wholly just 
in her complaint of the small salaries paid 
to women teachers. But the explanation 
is not that they are discriminated against, 
it is simply the old law of supply and 
demand. The statistics given in the Re- 
port of the Federal Bureau of Education 
show that the average excess of women 
teachers over men is 72 per cent, for the 
whole country. The average pay for men 
is $47, and $39 for women, monthly. 
An average never expresses a mathemat- 
ical fact, it is only an approximation, and, 
as such, gives no idea of the actual salaries 
paid. In the cities of what in the report 
is called the North Atlantic Division, it is 
[65] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

doubtful if there are one per cent, of men 
on the eligible lists seeking positions in the 
grammar schools. On the eligible list of 
the city of Syracuse, there are more than 
enough seeking positions to supply the city 
for ten years, and no men applying for 
appointment as room teachers. Women 
graduates from the local coeducational 
college have crowded the lists for high 
school positions to an equal extent. These 
young women refuse positions in schools 
of the senior grade. It is only partly a 
matter of pay, as the majority claim that 
their college education has fitted them for 
something higher than to teach children. 
If their higher education is responsible 
for the belief that they are too well edu- 
cated to teach children, their college has 
badly fitted them for their calling. In- 
deed, so risky is the experiment of ap- 
pointing a recent graduate to a high school 
position, that Doctor Blodgett, the very 
efiicient Superintendent of Schools of 
[66] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

Syracuse, has repeatedly protested against 
such appointments. Competition is rap- 
idly placing the teacher of college rank on 
the same basis as the graduates of the nor- 
mal schools and teachers' training classes. 
In all the literature that has emanated 
from the coeducationists, there has been 
nothing said about the college coeducated 
girl at home. She must, for a certain 
period of her life, resume her place in the 
home environment, with the exception of 
those who teach, or the small number who 
enter the professions. What atmosphere 
does she bring with her, what return does 
she make for the family resources often 
strained to fit her for something useful? 
Elenor Hoyt, in Collier's Weekly for 
June 21, 1903, writes evidently in the 
fulness of knowledge of this interesting 
phase of the coeducated college woman. 
" The college girl from the small town 
finds it impossible ' to settle down and 
stagnate.' Something is wrong with an 
[67] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

education that does not provide a woman 
with resources to defy stagnation. The 
daughter cannot reheve her mother of 
long-carried domestic and social responsi- 
bilities, because these petty intrusions upon 
her time interfere with her self -culture. 
The college girl must carry the gospel of 
plaster casts and foreign photographs to 
the great unwashed, even if that work 
takes strength and energy, and, conse- 
quently, good cheer." There are fortu- 
nately many exceptions to this dark 
picture, otherwise coeducation as a home 
wrecker would exceed in force a Western 
cyclone; but, in theory, that is just what 
the system might be expected to do for a 
shallow, conceited girl. It is, as President 
Jordan wisely says, that some girls are not 
fit to be coeducated at a college. 



[68] 



CHAPTER III 

The Physiology of Coeducation 

One of the strongest arguments that the 
advocates of coeducation offer in favor 
of their system, is the improved healthj 
physically and mentally, of the women 
students. This claim is made so assid- 
uously as to lead one to believe that a 
similar condition does not exist among 
women at large, but that it is a distinguish- 
ing trait of the college woman. If the 
reader will bear in mind what has been 
said concerning the social life in colleges 
for both sexes, it will need no argument to 
establish the fact that there is nothing, 
either in the curriculum or in the social 
habits of the students, to maintain good 
[69] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

health in those who are well, or to enable 
those who are constitutionally deUcate to 
cope successfully with the four years of 
student life. She is admitted on the same 
physical standard that men are, and she 
continues on that basis throughout her 
course. The central idea of coeducation 
is the obHteration of the sex hne. The 
moment woman is held as something dif- 
ferent from man in needs and capacity 
for education, or that she offers any phys- 
ical limitations to its attainment, coedu- 
cation as a system in higher education will 
break down, and its most bigoted advo- 
cate can no longer claim any place or 
necessity for it. Any contention that 
women students show a continued im- 
provement in health and physique during 
their college course has no better basis in 
fact, or in reason, than many other claims 
upheld by the advocates of the system. 

What they make a point of is true of 
all young women who have a fair start 
[70] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

in the way of functional health, as they, 
mature in four years of advancing woman- 
hood, without regard to their station or 
occupation in life. 

This clears the way for an impartial 
inquiry into the subject of coeducation and 
women's health. In the interest of fair- 
ness, it may be said that many who have 
opposed it have made their specifications 
of the ill-effects of coeducation upon the 
health of women students too broad. It 
is not so much a matter of the greater 
liability of a physical breakdown during 
the pursuit of student life, in excess of 
other occupations of women, as it is of 
whether there are efficient functional 
reasons why women may not conform to 
the standard of men in the manner and 
method of study. And, further, if such 
conformity is enforced in colleges for both 
sexes, is her future health as well assured 
as it would have been had she been edu- 
cated along lines where due regard was 
[71] 



WOMAN^S U:NriTNESS 

given both to education and to woman- 
hood? 

Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, in her book 
on " The Question of Rest for Women," 
is obhged to reluctantly confess that forty- 
five per cent, of women suffer from men- 
strual pain. The experience of every 
physician who has opportunities for 
observation confirms this. Experience also 
shows that twenty per cent, of other 
women suffer from mental depression, las- 
situde, loss of appetite, and a general 
sense of physical ill. Here sixty-five per 
cent, of women offer a material reason 
why some modification should be made in 
her manner of study. Dr. Putnam Jacobi, 
in her experimental study of this function, 
shows that there is a marked increase of 
arterial blood-pressure just before, with an 
abrupt fall after its completion. There 
is also, during this function, an enormous 
increase of nerve waste, as shown by the 
increase in the excretion of urea in some 
[72] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

cases, and in other eases, while the sys- 
temic demands for its excretion exist 
equally in both cases, there is a marked 
failure of elimination. Here an actual 
poison is retained in the system, concen- 
trating in action on the gray matter of the 
brain frontal lobes. These women could 
labor with much less damage to their nerve 
centres over the wash-tub, than they could 
solve their problems in geometry, or con- 
strue their Latin prose. In view of these 
profound alterations in circulation and 
nutrition, to demand of women the same 
hours and continuity of work that men 
give to college work, is a physiological in- 
sult. To quote further from Dr. Putnam 
Jacobi, who is a staunch defender of the 
ability of her sex to do all manner of work 
at all times: " For theoretical reasons, ex- 
posed in detail, and from the results of 
observation, we are authorized in asserting 
that women do work better, and with much 
greater safety to health, when their work 
[73] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

is frequently intermitted, but that these 
intermittences should be at short intervals 
and lasting a short time, not at long in- 
tervals and lasting longer." She makes 
what we may term a solemn conclusion 
in the last paragraph of her brilliant book : 
" It remains true, however, that in our 
existing social conditions, forty-six per 
cent, of women suffer more or less at 
menstruation, and, for a large number of 
these, when engaged in industrial pur- 
suits, or others, under the command of an 
employer, humanity dictates that rest 
from work during the period of pain be 
afforded whenever practicable." If to 
those who suffer from actual physical 
pain is added twenty per cent, of others 
who suffer from the psychic disturbance 
of menstruation, we have a vast number 
of young women in our two-sex colleges 
who are treated with brutal inhumanity 
and indifference, for have we not the evi- 
dence of numerous defenders of coeduca- 
[74] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

tion that no difference is observed in the 
work of college girls during this period, 
and no complaints are made. -That no 
complaints are made is probably true, for 
any one who has studied girls knows very 
well that, when continually working in the 
presence of the other sex, they will suffer 
actual torture rather than betray the cause 
of their weakness. 

But Dr. Putnam Jacobi goes deeper 
into the cause of women's temperamental 
need for rest than the superficial one of 
menstruation. She concludes : " Finally, 
that they (intervals of rest) are required 
at all times, and have no special reference 
to the period of the menstrual flow." This, 
as our author states, is because women do 
work better and with less possible injury 
to health, when these short, but frequent, 
intervals of rest are observed. 

Now, no author the equal to Dr. Put- 
nam Jacobi in general professional learn- 
ing, or in special knowledge of her sex, 
[75] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

connected with any college for both sexes, 
has given this physiological side of coed- 
ucation any other attention than a general 
denial. In a flat contradiction, which, in 
most cases, is a summary of their igno-t 
ranee upon the subject, they appear to have 
disposed of the whole question to their 
own satisfaction. Coeducation is being 
tried before the bar of a public that is 
gradually becoming enlightened, and this 
question will have to be answered by argu- 
ments more valid than sneers and mean- 
ingless denials. 

Brilliant as is the work of Dr. Putnam 
Jacobi upon this important phase of coed- 
ucation, we have a more recent contribu- 
tion, based upon a wider range of data 
and bearing directly upon the subject of 
education. In the transactions of the 
American Gynecological Society for the 
year 1900, Dr. George J. Engelmann, the 
then president of the society, contributed 
a paper on " The American Girl of 
[76] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

To-day. The Influence of Modern Edu- 
cation on Functional Development." It 
may be said here that if coeducationists 
ignore this work of Doctor Engelmann, 
they will do so to their lasting regret. 
Space forbids doing more here than giv- 
ing a few extracts from this paper. In 
Table III., one hundred college women 
are tabulated, of whom ninety per cent, 
were sufferers before entering, and ninety- 
five per cent, during college life. The 
ratios are high, as the author included 
moderate sufferers. He says: " We have 
seen an aggravation of suffering with ad- 
vancing grade, as much as ten per cent.; 
and yet more in normal than in high, 
more in college than in high or prepara- 
tory school. The college alumnse, by 
their records, show sixty-six per cent, dur-* 
ing the earlier years of pubertal develop- 
ment, andir. isl:ate that organic trouble 
increasM during college from twenty-four 
to Jlfhrtl^-fsix per cent. A certain confirma- 
[ 77 ] 



% 
# 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

tion of these figures is, moreover, found 
in the experience of young women as to 
the increased difiiculty of work, mental 
or physical, during the menstrual period, 
and by the number who are excused from 
their regular duties at those times. We 
find this expression precisely where we 
should naturally expect it, where study is 
harder, and looked upon more seriously." 
In speaking of the pre-menstrual and 
post-menstrual waves of nervous excita- 
tion and blood-pressure, he says: " Intel- 
lectual vigor follows the same lines, and 
mental energy and acumen are, as a rule, 
diminished during the first days, at least, 
as is afiirmed by perhaps sixty-five per 
cent, of the many questioned, who state, 
that mental exertion, study, at that time, 
is more difficult and wearing, and requires 
greater effort. This mental depression is 
evident in the listlessness, indiff*erence, and 
inability to master tasks easy at other 
times, noted by every observant educator 
[78] 



poR Higher Coeducation 

as indicating the presence of the flow and 
the period of its first advent, and the 
brightest mind, the most sensitive, high- 
strung, nervous organization is, as a rule, 
the most responsive and most Hable to 
impairment during the menstrual period." 
Our author continues, with another and 
most important resume: " Functional dis- 
turbances are least in the first years of 
pubertal development in the high school, 
increasing with each year, increasing in the 
normal school and college, increasing with 
intensity and seriousness of work; in one 
institution we see an aggravation of from 
sixty- four to seventy per cent, in the fresh- 
man class, and to eighty per cent, in the 
higher classes. This is not the effect of 
brain-work alone, but of all the conditions, 
mental and physical, of school life, the 
resultant of concomitant circumstances, as 
is shown by the widely different conditions 
in various institutions, but the dependence 
upon school life is distinctly characterized 
[79] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

by increase of suffering, more frequent 
recurrence from eighteen to twenty-five 
and even as often as once in fourteen 
days, toward the latter part of the school 
year, with return to the normal in vacation, 
usually recurring with the resumption of 
fall work, but certainly with the tire which 
comes toward the close of the session 
in spring. This deterioration in health, 
general and functional, in the college girl, 
is not the natural accompaniment of in- 
creasing years, as is proven by a comparison 
of her condition with that of the working 
girl. It is distinctly a sequence to college 
life, directly and indirectly, not due alto- 
gether to mental strain, but to the com- 
bined influences of life and methods of 
training. This comparison is instructive, 
though unjust to the working girl, and 
I refer to it because it has been made to 
show that the influences of school and col- 
lege life are no more deleterious to the 
peculiar organization of women than those 
[80] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

to be encountered in other occupations in 
the active pursuits of hfe. It is unjust, 
because the sole aim and object of the 
one is the development of all the powers 
and faculties, guided by instructors whose 
duty it is to perfect this development, and 
correct faults physical as well as mental. 
The other is engaged in the struggle for 
existence, and in the keen competition of 
the day must expect wounds, however the 
humanitarian may seek to guard her." 

Taken from the report of the committee 
of Association of College Alumnge for 
1855 on the Health of Women Col- 
lege Graduates, Doctor Engelmann shows 
sixty-six per cent, with menstrual ir- 
regularities, as compared with fifty- 
three per cent, during the earlier years 
of pubertal development, and states that 
organic trouble increased during col- 
lege life from twenty-four to thirty-six 
per cent. In conclusion. Doctor Engel- 
mann says: " To the educator I would 
[81] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

say that heed must be given the instability 
and susceptibility of the girl during the 
functional waves which permeate her en- 
tire being; that emotional stimulation 
must be avoided, and decided concessions 
must be made to the depression, physical 
and psychical, the lessened inhibition, and 
physiological control during the fluctua- 
tions of menstruation." Our author calls 
attention to the sex trait already alluded 
to, and which explains why so many col- 
lege instructors for both sexes insist that 
women students make no complaints and 
show no impairment in work, due to func- 
tional causes. The author says: "The 
number and intelligence of those examined 
are such that we must accept the data, and 
accept, too, the fact that unfavorable con- 
ditions, that suffering irregularity, and 
impediment to work, are never thoroughly 
revealed; they are always likely to be 
below the true mark by reason of the in- 
herent imwillingness of women to admit 
[82] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

imperfections of this nature." This in- 
stinctive reticence concerning the func- 
tional life must be greatly intensified in 
mixed colleges, in which, if a woman stu- 
dent were periodically absent from class 
work, she would, in her exaggerated state 
of self -consciousness, believe that the eyes 
of every man student there were upon her, 
with a full understanding of the reason. 
Many college women, who have consulted 
me professionally concerning their health, 
have stated this fact as a positive reason 
why they cannot lighten their work, and 
that all whom they knew, who were func- 
tional sufferers, felt the same about it. If 
we could get the secret history of these 
women, it would reveal a degree of phys- 
ical courage to work under difficulties, 
and a heroism in suppressing emotions, 
that would call forth our tenderest sym- 
pathy and highest admiration. One other 
matter in the functional disturbance of 
women during educational life requires 
[83] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

a brief notice, especially as it is touched 
upon but lightly in any discussion of this 
subject. The evidence upon functional 
pain and excess is ample, but, a^ showing 
the profound nervous inhibition, and the 
important fact that the pelvic organs al- 
ways become the storm centre, the total 
arrest of function is important. This ar- 
rest is purely emotional, and is so common 
in educational institutions, that it has re- 
ceived a distinctive name, the French call- 
ing it " Amenorrhea des pensionat.'' In- 
stances of it have occurred in the same 
student at the opening of every college 
year. Its average duration is three 
months. It resists all the usual treatment 
of such a condition, and terminates spon- 
taneously. Meanwhile, the student is not 
capable of her best work, is languid and 
pale, with indigestion and insomnia. 

Coeducation has nothing to do with its 
causation, but, as contravening the stock 
argument of the coeducationists that 
[84] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

women have no functional traits that 
would conflict with the routine of study 
followed by men, it is conclusive evidence 
to the contrary. The last word that can 
define this difl^erence has been spoken by 
Dr. Putnam Jacobi; she says: " Our ob- 
servations should show that in all these 
respects the intermenstrual, and especially 
the premenstrual, periods, represent a 
pregnancy in miniature." Could sex dif- 
ferentiation, that has any possible bearing 
upon the question of women observing the 
routine of study prescribed for men, have 
a more reaching effect than this? 

To quote Dr. Edward H. Clark, in his 
" Sex in Education," and I do so with all 
the more pleasure from the fact that his 
little book was the first to focus public 
attention upon the fact that, while educa- 
tion had the same meaning and end for 
women as for men, it had wide physio- 
logical differences in its method. His 
book appeared in 1874, when coeducation 
[ 85 1 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

was first beginning to assume its aggres- 
sive form, and anything in opposition was 
sure to be roundly abused. 

Few books ever were more virulently as- 
sailed. He roused a campaign of abuse, 
the sure indication of a weak cause, and 
among the multitude of replies not one 
refuted a single fact stated by Doctor 
Clark. " They may study," he says, " the 
same books, and attain equal results, but 
should not follow the same methods. 
Mary can master Virgil and Euclid as 
well as George ; but both will be dwarfed, 
— defrauded of their rightful attain- 
ments, — if both are confined to the 
same methods. It is said that Elena Cor- 
naro, the accomplished professor of six 
languages, whose statue adorns and honors 
Padua, was educated like a boy. This 
means that she was initiated into, and mas- 
tered, the studies that were considered to 
be the peculiar dower of men. It does 
not mean that her life was a man's life, 
[86] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

her way of study a man's way of study, 
or that, in acquiring six languages, she 
ignored her own organization. Women 
who choose to do so can master the hu- 
manities and the mathematics, encounter 
the labor of the law and the pulpit, endure 
the hardness of physics, and the conflicts 
of politics; but they must do it all in 
woman's way, not in man's way. In all 
their work they must respect their organi- 
zation and remain women, not strive to be 
men, or they will ignominiously fail. For 
both sexes, there is no exception to the law 
that their greatest power and largest at- 
tainment lie in the perfect development 
of their organization. Wherein they are 
men, they should be educated as men; 
wherein they are women, they should be 
educated as women. The physiological 
motto is, educate a man for manhood, a 
woman for womanhood, both for human- 
ity. In this lies the hope of the race." It 
must not be the conclusion of the reader 
[87] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

from the foregoing that these hmitations 
are confined to the college girl. The girl 
in the counting-room and store, or factory, 
labors under the same functional disadvan- 
tages. With the latter, however, it is less 
trying to keep a fair average of physical 
work than it is for the college girl to keep 
on an effectual level with men in purely 
intellectual work. The working girl has 
the advantage of a sturdier physique, 
while the woman student is a product of 
the schools all through her life, and has 
developed the intellectual at the expense 
of the physical side of her organization. 
She has in that degree increased the zone 
that is responsive to physical suffering, 
and without the hardened fibre of nerve 
and muscle that enables her to endure. 
Women enter college only half prepared 
— she is perfect in her prescribed studies, 
but her physical training has been entirely 
neglected. In nearly all secondary schools, 
no attention is paid to physical education 
[88] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

of girls. The boys fare better, not because 
they receive any more attention along 
these lines, but in the high schools the boy 
is at an age when athletics appeal to him, 
and voluntary sporting clubs keep him in 
good training. Simply to show how this 
essential to education is neglected in sec- 
ondary schools, it is only necessary to 
mention the instance of Syracuse, New 
York, in which city a high school was 
erected at a cost of $400,000, without a 
gymnasium, or a place in the building in 
which one could be installed. The college 
girl does her first gymnasium work after 
she enters college. Coming into her life 
at a period when nutrition is centring 
upon function, which is only on the 
threshold of maturity, it is difficult to 
divert this nutrition in the direction of 
muscular development. The gymnasium 
work of the young men is carried on for 
a different object than that of young 
women. Outside athletics is what he is 
[89] 



WoMAK^s Unfitness 

working for, and compared to which the 
work of the young woman is hke a pen- 
itential sacrifice. It is a common expe- 
rience among physicians of a university 
town to write letters, calling the attention 
of physical directors to some young 
woman who is being pushed too far in her 
training. It is the old cry of the girl who 
will struggle on and not complain. On 
the sexual side of her life, a young woman 
is a moral coward, with a huge preponder- 
ance of physical courage. There is a sad 
lack of discretion in those who direct the 
physical work of college girls. No atten- 
tion is paid to functional periods, and she 
cannot " cut her gym " without getting 
marked. The writer could name several 
delicate girls who left college on account 
of their inability to meet the demands of 
gymnasium work. 

The coeducationist has one stereotyped 
reply to this. " The woman's health is 
perfect. She is never absent from recita- 
[90] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

tions or from her physical training. She 
never complains, and she compares more 
than favorably with that of the men. 
Therefore she is well, and can't suffer 
more than a man, because if she did, how 
could she do her work? " " This talk 
about girls suffering pain and lassitude 
and mental tire at certain times is senti- 
mentalism and nonsense. A few may do 
so, we don't know about it, we teach 
them and we know. Coeducation has 
come to stay." The reader may search 
through the literature of the subject, and 
if he can find any other answers than those 
summarized above, he has discovered a 
logical and sympathetic professor in a col- 
lege for both sexes, an individual who has 
had hitherto a mythical existence. There 
has never been the slightest reference to the 
fact that sixty per cent, of young women 
are functional sufferers, that at such times 
they need rest, not long periods, but short 
and often repeated periods of rest, as Dr. 
[91] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

Putnam Jacobi shows. The inference is 
forced upon one that they either are want- 
ing in candor, or are ignorant. If they 
object to this indictment of unfairness or 
ignorance, then why do they not meet the 
facts as thoroughly estabhshed by scien- 
tific and competent observers upon the 
subject, in the interest of truth and the 
physical and mental well-being of the 
women who are entrusted to their care? 
Instead of that, they one and all assert 
what is false, and studiously ignore the 
teachings of science. 

Colleges for both sexes either make no 
reports upon the health of students, or, 
when reports are made, they are so com- 
piled that they have no scientific value. 
In Volume II., page 1888, of the Re- 
port for 1899 - 1900 of the Commissioner 
of Education at Washington, we are 
enabled to trace the histories of some 
of these women. We first take the statis- 
tics given in the great group of colleges 
[92] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

condensed in the Northern Central Divi- 
sion, comprising twelve States. This 
division is taken for the reason that it 
has the largest college population, and 
that in this group coeducation has the 
strongest foothold. There are 10,620 
women students, of whom only fourteen 
per cent, complete their college course by 
taking the various bachelor degrees. The 
question is obvious: is this enormous loss 
of eighty-six per cent, due in any way 
to impaired health, or physical break- 
down, or did eighty-six per cent, of the 
women find after its trial that coeducation 
was a failure? It is probable that the 
two factors are mixed, and it would be 
important to know which factor governed. 
Contrasting with this the group comprised 
in the Northern Atlantic Division, which 
President Murray, in Collier's Weekly, 
with a wit which was keenly appreciated 
by coeducationists, called a narrow strip 
of seaboard as provincial as Honduras. 
[93] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

The women students number only 2,675, 
of whom eighteen per cent, complete their 
college course. In the absence of carefully 
collected statistics, it would be impossible 
to say what proportion of this number of 
failures is due to impaired health. Prob- 
ably it is only a comparatively small num- 
ber. It is not so much a matter of phys- 
ical breakdown during the pursuit of 
student life as it is a failure of coeducation 
itself to meet the expectations of the 
women in its educational test. 

That young women can follow men in 
the same studies, with the same unremit- 
ting study periods, with her radical func- 
tional differences, appears upon the face 
of it an unreasonable proposition. Yet it 
is one that is made without any qualifica- 
tion by the advocates of bisexual educa- 
tion. A sad feature of this side of the 
question is that the breakdown may not 
occur during college, but come to her like 
a heritage of her violated physiological 
[94] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

life when the final strain is made upon her 
vitality by motherhood. It is the edu- 
cated young mothers that show the sad 
havoc made by maternity; the class that 
has developed the cerebral faculties at the 
expense of the brawn and muscle needed 
at this supreme hour of a woman's life. It 
is among this class that we find the failure 
of physiological function that results in 
sterility, in anaemia, in neurasthenia, and 
hysteria. Among them we find the carp- 
ing wife, the woman who bears the burden 
of an unsatisfied life, of unappeased 
longings that make life so hard to bear 
and make her, to those who love her, so 
difficult to understand. Coeducation ought 
to aid and to conserve the race, the race 
of young women upon whom the nation 
relies to preserve and keep vital the colo- 
nial ideal. Faults of education, of train- 
ing, are causing a profligate waste of this 
precious element in the national life. We 
are able to preserve the virility of the men 
[95] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

who will carry onward the colonial tradi- 
tion, but we fail to keep intact the func- 
tional stability of the woman who must 
contribute of her womanhood, if we are 
to preserve that regnant race which is 
known among all the earth as the Amer- 
ican. 

We are justified in demanding of those 
who ,are in charge of the education and 
training of this class of young women 
that they permit no spirit of commercial- 
ism to stand in the way of reform. A 
system of education that fails to build 
a strong and healthy body, that is heed- 
less of the inexorable laws of sex, will, 
at some future time, find itself on trial 
at the bar of public opinion, and will be 
measured, not by its standard of educa- 
tion, but by the damage it has caused 
to the vitality of American women. It 
may be heard from every side that the 
American of the colonial strain is dy- 
ing out. This is positively true, and is 
[96] 



FOR Higher Coeducatiok 

due to a diminishing birth rate, which, 
if it continues at its present ratio, will 
result in extinction in the course of a 
century. It is almost impossible to be- 
lieve that an honorable man will make as- 
sertions that amount to falsehood simply 
to make a point in an argument. Pres- 
ident Nicholas Murray, in his paper al- 
ready quoted, says: " Statistics prove 
that women students and women grad- 
uates are healthier than their married 
sisters." This is simply what the writer 
states, that marriage and motherhood are 
the crucial tests of the American woman's 
vitality, and in which she is found want- 
ing. With fine consistency and a logic 
peculiar to himself, he continues: "The 
statistics show that there are fewer child- 
less marriages among them, and that they 
have a larger proportion of children." 
The statistics are all the other way, that 
there are more childless marriages and a 
smaller number of children to each mar- 
[97] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

riage than is found among the American 
woman otherwise trained and educated. 
Well may President Murray remark near 
the conclusion of his article, " A prejudice 
well held is worth two convictions." Co- 
education has not been the only factor in 
a restricted birth-rate, as it is of too recent 
growth, but, going back to 1870, in elab- 
orate articles on the decrease of the birth- 
rate among American families, by Dr. 
Nathan Allen, of Lowell, he affords se- 
rious matter for thought on the part of 
coeducationists who have a tendency to 
quote false statistics. It will be a sad day 
for America when the story of those who 
created the Empire of the People is pre- 
served in the voiceless words of the printed 
page, instead of being vitalized by the 
current of living tradition. 



[98] 



CHAPTER IV 

Does Coeducation Educate ? 

Coeducation assumes it to be true that 
men and women, in the final education, 
which fits them for their various duties 
in hfe, require the same education both 
in methods and kind. If this is correct, 
then the training of the sexes in mixed 
colleges is based upon justly assumed 
premises ; if it is not, then coeducation 
is a retrogression instead of an advance, 
and is effectual only in doing incalcu- 
lable harm to those who submit to the 
method. In higher education the old 
idea of the humanities for culture is giv- 
ing place to education for the sake of the 
utilities. Universities of the first rank 
LofC' [99] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

are cutting down their four years' curric- 
ulum, filling their last year with elective 
work so that those who enter the profes- 
sional schools can complete their college 
and professional work in seven years in- 
stead of eight. Here educators practically 
admit that preparatory college work must 
depart from old standards and take spe- 
cial directions with a view of the best 
training for the different lines of profes- 
sional study. The lawyer, the doctor, and 
the man who is preparing for a teaching 
career, each specialize differently in his 
junior college year, both with a view of 
saving time and for better fitness for 
future work. There is no doubt but that 
this concession on the part of colleges is 
a direct advance as it conforms to the 
utilitarian and commercial period in which 
we live. 

This is a direct challenge to the system 
of education as carried out in mixed col- 
leges. Change their curriculum as they 
[100] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

may, they cannot alter the fact that the 
theory of coeducation is lagging hope- 
lessly behind so far as it can furnish any 
course of electives which will prepare men 
and women v/ith special fitness for their 
widely different careers. The sex problem 
intervenes, as it always has done, and as 
it always will do. Industrial feminism 
has so broadened that her education must 
conform to her new industrial relations. In 
technical education this has been given 
practical form, but not in the college cur- 
riculum, or in professional schools. There 
men and women are educated on identical 
lines without any reference to the wide 
divergence that in after-life defines their 
careers even in the same profession. This 
is not due to those who outlined the cur- 
ricula of the mixed colleges, but it was 
a concession to meet the demands of 
woman, who has, from too hasty general- 
ization, given herself up to the false 
theory that if she were to be educated 
[101] 



WoMAN'^s Unfitness 

along the identical lines that time-honored 
traditions and experience have proved 
were the best for man, she would be able 
to do a man's work in the same way that 
man does it. She has assmned that edu- 
cation is able to suppress the sexual dif- 
ferences that exist, not alone physically, 
but that which is equally marked in the 
mentality of men and women. These 
differences, when applied to women, have 
been called sexual limitations, but sex 
assigns no limit to the intellectual proc- 
esses of men and women. These differ- 
ences are not limitations, but divergences, 
in mental products. She simply cannot 
take man's point of view, and the more 
mature she is and the more thoroughly 
educated and specialized, the more widely 
she diverges from man. When industrial 
feminism has reached a higher level, when 
women have created their own standards, 
and ceased to compare themselves indus- 
trially with men, they will work as eff ec- 
[102] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

tually and be given the same recognition. 
This is not saying that there are two 
standards of work, one for men and the 
other for women. There is but one stand- 
ard for work, that of efficiency, and those 
for whom the work is rendered will apply 
it rigidly to men and women alike. Until 
woman has recognized her own standard 
and measured her efficiency thereby, she 
will never do her best work, and show 
effectually along what lines she is capable 
of competition with man. In order to 
create her standard of efficiency, she must 
begin to plan a system of education that 
will be most effective in creating a special 
fitness for her work. She will never do 
this until she has reconsidered her line of 
argument by which she formulated the 
crude theory that an education identical 
with that acquired by man was the one 
thing needed. I believe if woman were to 
do this, and abandon the male standard by 
which she has fettered her best efforts, 
[103] 



•^.. 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

she would not only receive the same indus- 
trial recognition, but she would excel him 
along any lines of work inside of her phys- 
ical limitations. 

And first, coeducation in colleges or- 
ganized upon the basis of a single sex, and 
that sex man, must be abandoned. Woman 
has given it many years of trial, and 
she ought to have been convinced ere this 
that it was a flat failure. She has not 
bettered her position in the professions. 
She is subordinated by man when she 
ought to be, by her mental abilities, his 
coequal. She has labored by his side as 
diligently and as effectually as he has. 
Nevertheless he has carried off the prize, 
while the best that can be said of him 
is that he was her intellectual equal. Will 
the woman who so determinedly advocates 
her right to coeducation stop and reflect 
upon the fact that the education in which 
she has had a share was the product of 
ages of experience, and designed solely 
[104] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

for man; to develop his fitness for his 
elected life-work, and not to develop her 
fitness for hers. Coeducation, therefore, 
unless radically modified for woman's par- 
ticipation in it, is a rank injustice to 
woman, and does violence to those fine 
intellectual qualities that she may justly 
claim as an endowment. 

Men who advocate coeducation have 
seen and admitted sexual differences in 
mental endowment that demand unlike 
educational treatment. President Jordan, 
in his Popular Science Monthly article, 
says: " Women take up higher education 
because they enjoy it; men because their 
careers depend on it. Only men, broadly 
speaking, are capable of objective studies. 
Only men can learn to face fact without 
flinching, unswayed by feeling or prefer- 
ence. The reality with women is the way 
the fact affects them. Original investiga- 
tion, creative art, the resolute facing of 
the world as it is, belong to man's world, 
[105] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

not at all to that of the average woman. 
That women in college do as good work 
as men is beyond question. In the mii- 
versity they do not, for this difference 
exists, the rare exception only proving the 
rule, that women excel in technique, men 
in actual achievement. If instruction 
through investigation is the real work of 
the university, then in the real university 
the work of the most gifted woman may 
be only play." Elsewhere he says: 
" Shall we give our girls the same educa- 
tion as our boys? Yes and no. If we 
mean by the same, an equal degree of 
breadth and thoroughness, an equal fitness 
for high thinking and wise acting, yes, let 
it be the same. If we mean this: shall 
we reach this end by exactly the same 
course of study, then the answer must be 
no. For the same course of study will 
not yield the same results with different 
persons." President Butler, of Columbia, 
in an article in Colliers Weekly, super- 
[106] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

ficially says: "No two men require just 
the same training, much less all men. The 
same is true of women, they being human. 
It appears, then, that the system of edu- 
cation must be elastic enough to take care 
of infinitely varied individualities. We 
are just leaving this and acting accord- 
ingly."^ 

Making due allowance for President 
Butler's prejudices, he does not mean 
what he says. There are not an infinite 
number of inhabitants on earth, much less 
individualities. 

Professor Slosson, in an article in the 
Independent, already referred to, says: 
" No two persons should be taught the 
same things, or in the same way, and the 
direction of educational progress in the 
future will be, I hope, toward greater dif- 
ferentiation of studies, methods, and aims. 
If this occurs, there will be, I believe, a 
more complete separation of the sexes than 
now prevails in educational schools." 
[107] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

Whether women will realize the error, 
and act as energetically in its correction 
as they were strenuous in their demands 
for coeducation, time will reveal. They 
have everything against them now — fac- 
ulties brought up under the tradition of 
older education, curricula carefully ma- 
tured for the benefit of man, to which 
they are obliged to warp their mental 
fabric, and, more difficult to overcome 
than all else, the commercialism that ren- 
ders their very valuable contributions to 
the college funds too desirable to be given 
lightly up. 

Let us change from the mistakes made 
by women to the mistakes made by men, 
who created the machinery by which 
women are made to adjust their mental 
status to that of men. There is no evi- 
dence forthcoming from the advocates of 
the American idea that coeducation as 
practised is a hybrid produced by the un- 
holy union between two hostile theories. 
[108] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

Already in colleges for men, in the front 
rank of influence and progress, the old 
classical cult is on its final trial as to its 
utility and educational value. What mod- 
ifications have taken place, or those which 
are yet to be, are in the interest of man. 
The bisexual idea takes no part in the 
new curriculum. This is advance; it is 
evolution to a higher level in educational 
methods. Can the mixed colleges join in 
this advance, and, if they do, can they 
model their changed methods after that 
of the single sex institutions, where the 
evolution is limited in its benefits to men 
alone? If they adopt the latter, woman 
must be left out in the plan of betterment, 
and be made to take her chances in the 
future as she has done in the past. If, 
however, woman is to receive due consider- 
ation in whatever improvement in methods 
they deem^ fit to adopt, it must be given 
her at the expense of the more perfect 
system adopted by the single sex college. 
[109] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

In any event, coeducation cannot be kept 
in the front rank of improvement. It is 
hopelessly handicapped by striving to 
make a single organization perform two 
functions. The conviction cannot be 
evaded that it stands in the way of prog- 
ress. This may be a subject upon which 
the advocates of coeducation may en- 
deavor to establish a contrary conclusion 
now, but the time is not remote when the 
truth of our contention will be self-evi- 
dent. With women in clubs and as- 
sociations, united in State and national 
organizations, all demanding the so-called 
privileges and immunities, real or imag- 
inary, of men, the authorities of the 
mixed colleges will have a difficult task 
to convince women that a man's education, 
either in college or the professional and 
technical schools, is not the better way to 
fit her to equal her coworker man in the 
value of his labor. The strenuous de- 
mands of women have carried the author- 
[110] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

ities of colleges, honestly striving to do 
their best, off their feet. Professors in 
coeducational institutions have confessed 
that the extent of the evil was recognized, 
but so great was the pressure brought to 
bear by women that no correction ap- 
peared possible. There is no evasion of 
the fact that coeducation is popular with 
women ; still there is not a college in which 
it exists, that, if it were left to the vote 
of the men, it would not be promptly sup- 
pressed. It cannot be denied that men, 
who earn their degrees in coeducational 
colleges, on going out, find that they have 
to take a lower rank than the men who 
graduate at Yale, Harvard, or Union. 
While this does not lessen the value of the 
education they have acquired at their alma 
mater, it does impair the social value of 
what they have worked and paid their 
money for. 

In every way, socially, educationally, 
and economically, coeducation gives less 
[111] 



Woman'^s Unfitness 

out of college life than the students of the 
single-sex colleges get out of theirs. That 
a change may be reached, there must be 
a campaign of education among women 
outside of college lines, — the hard, bitter 
education of experience in her battle of 
life where competition knows no mercy. 
As long as woman's plaint is heard of 
scanty recognition and inadequate com- 
pensation, just so long she may know that 
the old errors in her educational training 
prevail. The trustees who have seen in 
coeducation a matter of revenue only, will 
make haste to restore the order of single- 
sex colleges when they find that men are 
deserting their institutions. Millions can 
be lavished upon them without avail, as 
was proved by the Chicago University, 
which had surrendered so thoroughly to 
the sex theory that young men left the 
institution to preserve their dignity. ) It 
was one of the marvels of college admin- 
[112] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

istration to witness the quick change of 
conviction among the authorities. 

It is among two-sex institutions that 
have grafted the university idea upon the 
original type of college that the most 
glaring injustice is measured out to the 
women students. The medical school, the 
law school, and the post-graduate courses 
in the mechanical arts and applied sciences 
are all modelled upon the needs of the one 
sex in the practical relations of life. Let 
us examine her opportunities in medical 
education by the side of men. It is here 
that the greatest injustice is done to her. 
In elementary medicine and the coordinate 
branches, under the modern method of 
text-book recitations, her chances are 
equal, but it is on the practical side that 
she is made to suffer the penalties of the 
sex. She must be a brave woman, to he- 
roically overcome what is most repellent 
to her woman's instinct, or she will find 
herself thrown upon the world to earn her 
[113] 



4 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

own living only half -educated in her 
chosen calling, and she must do this in 
the battle with a competition that is merci- 
less. Can it be supposed that a young 
woman can suppress the heredity of ages 
of sexual environment and tradition, and 
look unmoved upon the grossest exhibition 
of the male form, knowing that she is 
under the scrutiny of the unsympathetic 
glances of the men of her class, and pre- 
serve through such an ordeal a calmly re-» 
ceptive mind? It is not a matter of 
modesty, it is one of sex, which has 
been ignored all through her career as 
a subject of coeducation. What woman 
feels and resents is not an attack on her 
modesty, but on her right of sexual ret- 
icence. A man may be as modest as a 
woman, but he does not mentally retreat 
before the exhibition of the sexual ideaL 
A man is only half -sex, his coarser fibre, 
his lower tone of emotional life, make sex 
with him something casual, to be encoun- 
[114] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

tered and then forgotten. Woman is all 
sex, her faculty of potential motherhood, 
the periodical insistence of her sexual life, 
like a stigmata, forces the logic of her 
being into her conscious existence. It be- 
comes with her a physical and a mental 
attribute. She cannot forget. It is this 
ever present consciousness that makes her 
repel the outward token, and throw 
around it a reticence that is to her sacred. 
Its invasion rouses her to resistance, not 
against her sex, but against whatsoever 
would lay bare her consciousness of phys- 
ical womanhood. In this lies her weak- 
ness in the hard competition with men, but 
it is also her armor. 

In no other relation are these traits so 
nearly strained to the breaking-point as 
in coeducational medicine, and in none are 
they more brutally ignored. Do medical 
women need the same education in the 
practical side of education and training 
as do medical men? It can be positively 
[115] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

answered no. A woman enters upon her 
practical career a specialist. A specialty 
with a man physician is a matter of choice, 
with a woman it is one of necessity. A 
woman treats the ailments of her sex, ad- 
mittedly one of the most difficult branches 
of medicine. Let a single instance of the 
manner in which the woman student is 
helped to specialize in her important 
branch suffice, especially as one of the 
best and most thorough of the country 
schools of medicine will be put in evidence, 
the medical department of Syracuse Uni- 
versity. Gynecology is taught only dur- 
ing the last or senior year. The announce- 
ment reads as follows: " Didactic lectures, 
two sessions a week for four months. Clin- 
ical lectures, one session a week for four 
months." Thus all the woman student can 
learn of what will constitute her life-work 
is acquired on the theoretical side in thirty- 
two lectures, and on the practical side in 
sixteen clinics. Within the knowledge of 
[116] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

the author no other two-sex medical school 
oiFers anything better. If women were 
given the same opportunities for poi^- 
graduate hospital appointments as the 
male graduate, the situation would be par- 
tially relieved, but they are not, as but few 
hospitals throughout the country are open 
to the appointment of women internes. 

" In medicine," says Mr. Finck, " fe- 
male practitioners are now, and always 
will be, chiefly specialists in women's 
diseases, which cannot be taught in mixed 
classes. The Chicago Medical College 
came to grief just a year ago, after thirty- 
two years of existence, because it was 
organized on the theory that women should 
have exactly the same training in medi- 
cine and surgery as men." (The Inde- 
pendent. ) Mr. Finck only needed to add, 
the same training in the same way as men, 
to make his position complete. 

The medical school will offer the de- 
fence that it is not its function to educate 
[117] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

specialists, a point well taken if they had 
not invited into their student body a class 
that must from the necessity of their hm- 
itations become specialists from the first 
day they offer their services to the public. 
Is this a fair and equitable division of 
medical education for men who may be- 
come gynecologists if they please, and for 
women who become gynecologists because 
they must? Why women submit to this 
when there are well-equipped medical 
schools for women, where they are special- 
ized during their student life, and well 
fitted to enter upon their life-work, is one 
of the anomalies fostered by the coeduca^ 
tional idea. They have been taught to 
believe that they cannot compete with 
men unless they are trained along his lines, 
or unless so educated that they have lost 
something that gives to man his preem- 
inence in professional life. Woman will 
miss her true place in medicine until she 
realizes that it is her sex and the cosex 
[118] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

of those who seek her skill and sympathy 
that define her place as a medical woman, 
and that to be made equal to the demands 
that will inevitably be made upon her from 
the very beginning of her career, she must 
be educated, not as men are, but as women 
ought to be. 

Although women are not as assiduously 
seeking entrance into the legal profession 
as they are into medicine, yet even here 
her work will differ from that of men in 
the same calling of life, and her usefulness 
and success will depend upon how well 
she has been differentiated in education 
and training to give her special fitness for 
her legal career. In all the practical sides 
of hfe for which women fit themselves by 
special education, it is not in the funda- 
mentals in which lies the difference in 
training, but in the more limited and tech- 
nical side which she will require by reason 
of her sex. 

There is one profession in which sex 
[119] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

offers no obstacle to a successful career, 
but on the contrary is adorned and made 
all the more effectual by those traits 
which hamper her in other callings. It is 
the profession of teaching, in which she 
more than keeps her place in the front, 
and is not in competition with man except 
in the matter of compensation. Even here 
she specializes to a degree that is not de- 
manded of her male fellow student. He 
speciahzes only in what he has elected to 
teach; the woman, taught by the inflexible 
methods implied by coeducation, special- 
izes in the same manner and degree, while 
the fact is overlooked by those responsible 
for her education that her career as a 
teacher will but rarely follow along the 
same lines. She is thus obliged to further 
specialize as to what methods will be 
needed. This the colleges for both sexes 
do not teach in their pedagogical course. 
That knowledge she must acquire after 
she has entered upon her work at the ex- 
[120] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

pense sometimes of her reputation and her 
professional pride. Any school board, or 
superintendent, could testify to the doubt 
as to fitness that attends the appointment 
of a young college woman to high school 
or academy work. In Syracuse, Superin- 
tendent Blodgett positively stated that he 
would recommend no college graduate 
who had not acquired her probational ex- 
perience elsewhere. It may be asked, is 
not this true of any young teacher? It 
is not to an equal degree among the 
graduates of State normal schools. She 
specializes there in methods with sole ref- 
erence as to what she is to teach. Practice 
and the science of her profession are ac- 
quired side by side, and, while coeducation 
is the rule, men and women are taught the 
same pedagogical art for the simple reason 
that they are prepared to teach the same 
things to pupils of the same educational 
grade. If the double-sex colleges were to 
open departments for the training of 
[121] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

grammar and high-school teachers, the 
woman would have an equal chance with 
her male coworker. But the coeducational 
colleges cannot do this; their work must 
meet the demands of men, and there are 
but few college men who do not hope to 
do better than to become gramimar or high- 
school teachers. That coeducation fails to 
prepare woman in the best manner for a 
profession in which she has reached the 
highest distinction, and that those who 
direct these institutions are conscious of 
their deficiencies, is proven by the fact 
that in the coeducational college of teach- 
ers and professors less than two per cent, 
are women. If women were given rec- 
ognition upon the teaching staff of col- 
leges for both sexes, there is but little 
doubt that many of the social complica- 
tions that mar the harmony of these in- 
stitutions would not occur, or would be 
minimized, as women by both natural tact 
and sympathy are better fitted than men 
[122] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

to deal with the psychic moments of the 
young and emotional of their sex. The 
spirit of commercialism which rules in 
these colleges would not tolerate placing 
women on a parity with men in the teach- 
ing force, as the male element in the stu- 
dent body would resent it as an encroach- 
ment on their rights, as women in many 
of these institutions are tolerated, rather 
than respected. 

In view of the restricted opportunities 
of woman to enter the higher ranks of 
professional teachers, she is allowed, and 
even encouraged, to fritter away precious 
time in doing elaborate postgraduate 
work with a view to earning advanced de- 
grees that can be of no possible use to 
her except that she may be prepared to 
take a professor's chair, which we have 
already shown, by the small ratios of 
women professors in mixed colleges, is 
from necessity nearly closed against her. 
In the science courses of these colleges she 
[ 123 ] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

is induced to specialize, with a view to pro- 
fessional work in architecture, geology, 
chemistry, and electricity, which, if she is 
not to teach these subjects, is wasted time, 
as her physical limitations would seriously 
hamper her if she followed them practi- 
cally in after-life in competition with 
men. Modern industrial feminism has 
opened many occupations which were for- 
merly restricted to men, and in which she 
is an active and successful competitor, but 
it will be observed that this invasion of 
man's industrial field begins when woman 
is physically the coequal of man, and ends 
abruptly at the line where this equality 
ceases and man's physical superiority be- 
gins. In the higher education of women 
this line must be known and strictly ob- 
served if women are to be given an equal 
chance in active life in which the inex- 
orable law of commercialism rules. In 
the mixed college, in which women are 
educated on the standard and after the 
[124] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

method of men, can this line be followed, 
or is any attempt made to follow it? It 
must be known to every competent edu- 
cator that her active life must diverge 
from that of man, and that beyond this 
industrial line there can be nothing in 
common between them. 

Education from the grammar school to 
the college has but one object in view, 
namely, to make good citizens and to fit 
the subject for the career in life best 
adapted to success and happiness. The 
thousands of young women in coeduca- 
tional colleges are not seeking education 
for the purpose of becoming teachers, doc- 
tors, lawyers, or professors, but they are 
looking forward to marriage, maternity, 
and social success. They cannot be edu^ 
cated too highly, refined too finely, made 
too womanly for the destiny, the joys of 
which have bloomed perennially in the 
hearts of women. The Am erican woman_ 
is the mos t^ marvellous human product of 

^ [125] 



i 



X^ > V w ^\ 5v» s V % ^>^v.o^^'^ ; 



Woman's Unfitness 

any age, or^ and. Educate, refine, and 
cultivate her and she lends herself to this 
with an innate facility; there is no grace 
lacking to distinguish her from the daugh - 
ter of a hundred earls. Cast at the most 
plastic period of her life, without restraint, 
and in the midst of a social environment 
that must blunt her finer social instincts, 
without the advice of the older and cul- 
tured of her sex, coeducation can give her 
nothing in return for the cost of this. 

In view of the facts presented, coedu- 
cation cannot be regarded as an advance 
in educational methods, or as giving an 
adequate return for the time spent or the 
possible dangers that attend the system. 
If not an advance, then it is a retroaction, 
and a misdirection of educational efforts. 
Its methods are wrong, and the social 
environment which the system creates is 
hostile to sound education and good man- 
ners. 

The young woman graduate has no re- 
[ 126 ] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

sources except teaching or matrimony, as 
but few of them enter the professions. 
As already shown (Chapter II.) she is 
above teaching children in the primary 
schools, and until her egoism is toned 
down by contact with the asperities of real 
life she is above matrimony as well. She 
is not fitted for commercial work, because 
she has never been taught practical busi- 
ness methods. She joins the great army 
of unemployed, prevented, by what Presi- 
dent Jordan calls the " true college spirit," 
from seeking a new education in a wage- 
earning occupation. The literature of the 
coeducation movement may be searched 
in vain for any demand for an elective 
business training such as would bring the 
young woman graduate into actual com- 
petition with the young man graduate who 
enters business. A few colleges have 
bookkeeping courses, more with a view to 
teaching than for practical use. Nowhere 
are the typewriter and stenography given 
[127] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

any place, without a knowledge of which 
most business offices are closed to the 
applicant. 

A doubt is cast upon the educational 
value of mixed colleges with a curricula 
common to both sexes by the fact that 
those who have seriously studied the sub- 
ject are not in agreement concerning the 
education of women. The president of 
Bryn Mawr says that women ought to be 
educated after the manner of men. Pres- 
idents Murray, Harper, Quimby, Jordan, 
and Eliot say that she requires a different 
course of study. Among experts who have 
had excellent opportunities of observing 
woman in the rough and in the educated 
product, there is no accord in opinion as 
to the value of coeducation. This diver- 
gence on the part of educators must be 
logically explainable. Is it not that they 
are disappointed in the results? The 
women who have been so trained have not 
shown the scholarship, the fitness for the 
[128] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

after earning life, that they had hoped 
for. That when the theoretical phase of 
coeducation was passed, and they were 
confronted by the results, there was ineffi- 
ciency, lack of purpose, and unfitness for 
practical life for women trained on a 
theory, that was not found among women 
who were not coeducated, or had received 
no college education. 



[129] 



CHAPTER V 

The Social Side of Life in Mixed 
Colleges 

The relations existing among the young 
men and women in colleges for both sexes 
have centred the attention of the public 
upon the problem of coeducation. It has 
afforded the public more subjects of com- 
plaint and criticism, and given the college 
authorities more opportunities to defend, 
than all other phases of the question com- 
bined. From an educational point of 
view it has not the importance of some 
of the topics discussed here, but it is one 
that appeals to all those who have daugh- 
ters undergoing the trials of coeducation, 
and to that larger public that takes either 
[130] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

a genuine or a morbid interest in whatever 
excites a constantly renewed attention. 
The escapades of the students afford a 
never- failing interest to the readers of 
newspapers, while the more glaring 
breaches of social convention are sent 
broadcast over the country by the news 
agencies. The attitude of the press toward 
this side of education is either one of com- 
ical narration or of scorching comment, 
so that the important and serious prob- 
lem of higher education for women has, 
through the questionable social attitude 
forced upon them by coeducation, lost its 
dignity and become a matter of doubt and 
apprehension on the part of all right- 
thinking people. 

It is proper, before going further, to 
allow the advocates of the mixed college 
methods to state what they are doing, or 
expect to do, for young men and women 
in a social way, because it is in this direc- 
tion that they claim to reach the better 
[131] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

and more practical results. These are 
among the latest utterances upon the sub- 
ject, and will be given without comment, 
in order that the reader may draw his own 
conclusions from contrasting these state- 
ments of mere opinion on the part of coed- 
ucators with the facts as they actually 
occur. 

President Butler says : "A wise college 
president wrote a few years ago that this 
intertraining and equal training take the 
simper out of the young woman and the 
roughness out of the young man. He was 
right. The woman who grows up sur- 
rounded by women and taught only by 
women, and the man who grows up sur- 
rounded by men and taught only by men, 
are a long time maturing. Both are ab- 
normal. The artificiality and the ab- 
surdity of the ordinary relations between 
men and women are chiefly due to social 
traditions, which gave rise to the system 
of separate education. Comradeship and 
[132] 



FOR Higher Coeducatio 



N 



friendship are eliminated, and the only 
conceivable associations with the other sex 
are love and marriage." 

President Jordan says: " Another con- 
dition very common and very undesirable 
is that in which young women live at home 
and traverse a city twice each day on rail- 
way or street cars to meet their recitations 
in some college. The greatest instrument 
of culture in a college is the college atmos- 
phere, the personal influence exerted by 
its professors and students. The college 
atmosphere develops feebly in the rush of 
a great city. The spur student en, or rail- 
way-track students, as the Germans call 
them, the students who live far from the 
university, get very little of this atmos- 
phere. The young woman who attends 
the university under these conditions con- 
tributes nothing to the university atmos- 
phere, and therefore receives very little 
from it. If young women enter the col- 
leges, they should demand that suitable 
[133] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

places be made for them. Failing to find 
this, they should look for it somewhere 
else." Previous to this quotation, he says: 
" When young women have no residence 
devoted to their use, and are forced to 
rent parlors and garrets in private houses 
of an unsympathetic village, associations 
which develop vulgarity cannot be used 
for the promotion of culture either for 
men or for women. That the influence 
of cultured women on the whole is op- 
posed to vulgarity is a powerful argument 
for education." 

Prof. E. E. Slosson, of the University 
of Wyoming, says in a very recent article 
in the Independent: " The sole remedy — 
or preventative, for I know of no remedy 
— for sexual hyperesthesia, is normal 
casual contact between men and women, 
especially when young, in their daily 
tasks and pleasures. As in electricity, the 
more complete the insulation, the higher 
the potential rises on each side until in- 
[134] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

stead of comparatively harmless sparkling 
we get a thunderbolt. No amount of for- 
mal meeting in society will accomplish this 
purpose. All balls are masked balls. To 
separate the sexes at the ages of, say 
thirty-five to forty, or nine to twelve, 
would do little harm, but to separate them 
completely, or, what is still worse, incom- 
pletely, between the ages of fifteen to 
twenty, is often injurious. I willingly 
admit that coeducation will not work well 
in some classes of society and with certain 
people. In fact, I think it requires a 
high standard of morals and intelligence 
to be even tolerable. There are girls 
who are not even fit to be sent to a coedu- 
cational college; who get harm and do 
harm. When such are detected, the pres- 
ident usually invites them to his private 
office, and gives them the same advice that 
Hamlet gave to Ophelia. But it should 
be said in fairness that such cases are more 
[135] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

often the result of perverted training than 
of any congenital defect." 

President Barnard, as quoted in Report 
of Commissioner of Education at Wash- 
ington, 1900-01, says: "But it is still 
objected that though the association of 
young women with young men in college 
may be beneficial to the ruder sex, it is 
likely to be otherwise to the gentlefr^TBig""""-^, 
delicacy and reserve which constitute in 
so high a degree the charm of the female -^ 
character are liable, it is said, to be worn 
off in the unceremonious intercourse of 
academic life, and the girl who enters 
college a modest, shrinking maiden is 
likely to come out a romping hoiden or a 
self -asserting dogmatist. Those who make 
this objection argue rather from assumed 
premises than from any facts of obser- 
vation." 

Having given the assertions of the ad- 
vocates of coeducation concerning the 
social life in mixed colleges, let us give 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

in contrast a few incidents that lead one 
to believe that the irrepressible problem of 
sex will, when left to the operation of its 
pristine laws, effect its own solution. 
These incidents are taken from the daily 
press, some local and others coming 
through the associated press. If not true, 
it would have been well for the reputa- 
tions of the institutions concerned to have 
demanded immediate retraction. As the 
statements were never denied or retracted, 
it is perfectly proper to assume that they 
are true. There is ample material of this 
character to make a volume, but space 
can only be given to such as will demon- 
strate the condition of social life created 
in colleges in which the sexes hold unre- 
strained relations. 

The following is from the New York 
Times of October 18, 1902. A young 
woman during the night desired to remove 
some freshman colors placed on the roof 
of a building. " The fire-escape over 
[137] 



WOMAN^S UNFITNESS 

which the ascent was made is in front of 
Willard Hall, and leads from the fourth 
floor to the roof. It leans from the build- 
ing as it leads to the roof, making the feat 
a daring one. After the young woman 
descended, she admitted that she was 
frightened as she climbed the iron ladder, 
and when she leaned over the side of the 
building to place the sophomore banner; 
the fact that the skylight had been ordered 
closed by the authorities in charge of the 
hall left the fire-escape as the only means 
of reaching the roof. The freshman- 
sophomore fight is now on in earnest." 
Further details are given, but it would 
not add to the significance of the daring 
act to repeat them here. This took place 
at Northwestern University, which has a 
large population of women compared to 
men (290 men, 280 women, in 1900). 
That which concerns us here is not that 
this woman made such a daring and un- 
womanly effort, for women have an in- 
[138] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

stinctive fear of climbing and high places, 
but why did she wish to do it, what force 
was at work in her mental equipment 
strong enough to impel her to act counter 
to the innate fears that belong to the un- 
cultured woman? It may be due to that 
quality in coeducation which, as President 
Murray Butler so delicately says, " takes 
the simper out of the young woman and 
the roughness out of the young man," a 
statement which is repeated ad nauseam 
in all coeducation arguments. It would 
be more to the truth to say that this 
" roughness " of the young men, which 
coeducation had failed to eliminate, had 
infected the young women and impelled 
them, by taking out their " simper," to 
emulate the young men. Many other in- 
cidents of this character could be related, 
and are as ^well if not better known to 
coeducationists than to others. And yet 
Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, with great com- 
placency, states : " In not a single instance 
[139] 



Woman's Unfitness 

is an argument against coeducation given 
which offers sufficient ground for the pro- 
posed retrogressive movement." (New 
York Sun, July 6, 1902.) In this same 
university the evils of the unrestrained re- 
lation of the sexes is awakening a reac- 
tionary spirit. In the English classes the 
" coeds " declare that love-making has be- 
come " too prevalent a practice and has 
been carried altogether too far. They 
joined in the declaration that while men 
were awkward and women timid when the 
sexes were separated, there are concealed in 
the sheep's clothing of coeducational virtue 
many ravaging wolves. Coeducation in the 
class-room ends in cowalking on the cam- 
pus. ) The girls contended that, pleasant 
as they were, extended strolls along the 
lake front were not conducive to good 
lessons.^ (Associated News, Syracuse 
Herald, January 25, 1903.) It was at 
this university, as already related in an- 
other chapter, that, following the an- 
[140] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

nouncement of the scholarship awards, the 
betrothal of two young men to two senior 
coeds was made known. ( New York Sun, 
September 28, 1902.) It is very evident 
that there was no control of the relations 
of the sexes on the part of the faculty, 
and that a dangerous degree of license 
prevailed, against which the women re- 
coiled in self-defence. Additional facts 
illustrating the social life prevailing in 
mixed colleges are furnished by the Syra- 
cuse University. The author has no ex- 
cuse to offer in referring to a local insti- 
tution, because the university is one of the 
best, if not the best, coeducational college 
in the United States. Its student body is 
composed of a superior class of young 
women and men. The head of the uni- 
versity. Chancellor Day, is firm and con- 
scientious in his government, and the uni^ 
versity has greatly prospered under his 
wise management. The faculty is a body 
of men, earnest and faithful in their work, 
[ 141 ] 



V 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

^ and who, while they beheve sincerely in 
the methods of coeducation, would not 
hesitate to either segregate or eliminate 
women from the student body if they were 
convinced that coeducation was wrong. It 
certainly follows that if social matters as- 
sume a state of threatening tension in such 
a carefully conducted university as Syra- 
cuse, the conditions existing in the so- 
called colleges of the West, for instance, 
must create the need for greater force 
in repression. The following incident il- 
lustrates the generally prevailing method 
of controlling social affairs among stu- 
dents in mixed colleges, and was the one 
followed at Syracuse until a crisis occiu*red 
in the social life at the college in the winter 
of 1903. 

" The way the students of Syracuse 
University take it upon themselves to reg- 
ulate the evils of coeducation in the uni- 
versity was brought to light yesterday in 
a rather interesting manner. The uni- 
[142] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

versity authorities provide no rules for 
the government of the students except 
that they are expected to abide by the 
laws of the city as citizens, and generally 
that is all that is needed. Occasionally 
an offence occurs, and then the upper 
class men are expected to take the matter 
in hand. Such a case has been running 
along for some time since the opening 
of college, and last night the crisis was 
reached. The offenders, there were two 
of them, had been spending most of 
their spare time 'going fussing,' either 
to one of the sorority houses or to one 
of the boarding-houses. Saturday night 
the upper class men, belonging to the 
same fraternity as the offenders, packed 
the young men's trunks, hired a cart- 
man, and sent them down early in the 
evening, one to the chapter-house and 
the other to the boarding-house. The 
trunks were labelled with the owners' cards 
and the statement that the owners would 
[143] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

be around to claim a room, and take the 
first regular meals Monday morning. 
The young men were not able to get their 
trunks back without stirring up a deal of 
comment from the other students who had 
heard of the affair." (Syracuse Herald, 
October 21, 1902.) 

" A meeting of the representatives of 
the fraternities and of the neutral organi- 
zations of Syracuse University will be 
called soon by Chancellor Day and Dean 
Frank Smalley to formulate plans for 
regulating the social life of the univer- 
sity. The authorities have made no start- 
ling disclosures and have discovered no 
new evils, but they have decided that it is 
time to restrict the amount of * fussing ' 
done by the young men, and the number 
of ' fudge parties ' given by the young 
women. Fussing is the term used to de- 
scribe calling on young women. During 
the last year or two evils have grown up 
which the authorities think need correct- 
[144] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

ing. Chief among them is the amount 
of calling done by the young men upon 
the young women and the number of 
fudge parties and dances held, several of 
them every week. The fraternities, and 
especially the sororities, are considered 
the chief offenders along the lines of 
parties and dances, although a large 
number of small parties are held during 
the year by the various boarding-houses 
which are frequented largely by the 
neutrals. The idea of holding a dance 
at the chapter-houses once or twice a 
month has taken hold of some of the fra- 
ternities so that the dance has become a 
regular feature of fraternity life at those 
places. Another source of evil is the num- 
ber of freshman parties held by the fra- 
ternities: every one of the fifteen frater- 
nities plan to hold a party during the 
college year in honor of the freshmen; 
then each fraternity usually entertains 
during the year in honor of other class 
[ 145 ] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

delegations. Dances are frequently given 
by the other organizations. The univer- 
sity band is holding a series of * band 
hops ' at Empire Hall this winter, which 
are held whenever there is a week that 
there is no other function scheduled. In 
addition to this, two other societies, the 
Double Seven, composed of sophomores, 
and the Moux Head, composed of juniors, 
have been organized especially for social 
purposes. 

" The university authorities have always 
been in favor of pleasant social relations 
between the men and women students in 
the university, but they believe that the 
"^ social whirl has been kept up without suffi- 
cient periods of rest, and one case is re- 
ported of a student who had declared 
repeatedly that he had no time for society, 
who had his life made miserable for him 
until he went * fussing ' with the others. 
The authorities say that what does the 
harm is the taking of the students away 
[ 146 ] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

from their work two or three times a 
week, keeping them up half the night, 
with the result that failures are recorded 
against them the following days in the 
class-rooms. Letters have come from the 
parents of young women asking that the 
girls be restricted from attending so many 
affairs. The university cannot well do 
this, as it has no control over those who 
do not live in the dormitory, Winchell 
Hall. There the door is closed at ten 
o'clock, and no one can get in later except 
those who have had permission to be out. 
This privilege is granted largely that the 
girls may attend the theatres, but even 
then no one can get in after twelve under 
any consideration. The plan. Dean Smal- 
ley says, is to call a meeting of the 
representatives of the various student or- 
ganizations, and discuss the matter in an 
open congress. The dean said that he did 
not believe in the laying down of any 
strict rules on the matter, but that it 
[147] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

should be discussed in an open conference, 
and that the evil should be adjusted by the 
students themselves, so soon as they see 
what the trouble is." (Syracuse Heralds 
December 13, 1902.) The above extract 
represents a state of affairs that the wise 
and witty President Butler, in his Collier's 
Weekly article, says " are all dead issues," 
but Syracuse University found them very 
much alive, as we shall learn when we find 
how the theory of the " open conference " 
worked out in practice. The idea that 
mixed colleges have no authority over 
their students because they are not resi- 
dent in dormitories is one of the most 
pernicious errors of the system. None of 
the poorer colleges have dormitories, and 
the students are scattered through the 
towns in boarding-houses, with no guides 
to good manners or good morals. Pres- 
ident Jordan, in his Popular Science arti- 
cle, says of it: " Students living at home 
or in boarding-houses of an unsympathetic 
[148] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

village, or travelling daily on railway or 
street cars, can contribute nothing to the 
college atmosphere, the personal influence 
exerted by its professors and students. 
The young woman who attends the uni- 
versity under these conditions contributes 
nothing to the university atmosphere, and 
therefore receives very little from it. She 
may attend her recitations and pass her ex- 
aminations, but she is in all essential re- 
spects in absentia^ and, so far as the best in- 
fluences of the university are concerned, 
she is neither coeducated nor educated. If 
young women enter colleges, they should 
demand that suitable places be made for 
them. Failing to find this, they should 
look for it somewhere else. Associations, 
which develop vulgarity cannot be used 
for the promotion of culture, either for 
men or for women." The facts, however, 
show that President Jordan is wrong 
about the " college atmosphere " devel- 
oped by the dormitory system. Whether 
[149] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

he would include the chapter-houses as 
offering " associations which develop vul- 
garity," it is difficult to say, but as 
they are certainly not "^^ in absentia''^ we 
conclude not. From the evidence already 
given, it appears that the effort to create 
environments best calculated to develop 
the college atmosphere, and which the most 
conservative coeducationists believe will 
afford a remedy for the admitted evils 
of the system, are the means of introduc- 
ing additional complications in the social 
control of students in mixed colleges. 
Before the introduction of chapter-houses 
and the erection of Winchell Hall at 

/Syracuse University, and while the women 
students were scattered in boarding- 
houses, but little was heard of social ex- 

V cesses or improper liberties between the 
isexes. Here there was as complete separa- 
tion between the sexes as was possible. 
The meetings occurred only in the class- 
room or in the streets. With concentra- 
[150] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

tion, trouble began. The young men were 
more difficult to control. Class rows at 
supper parties in suburban taverns or city 
hotels were the cause of great damage to 
private property. The moral tone of the 
young men was lowered, and nothing but 
threats of wholesale suspensions or expul- 
sions unless the damages were paid for 
by the offending classes kept the students 
under control. No sense of wrong in these 
disorders appeared to appeal to the young 
men. On the contrary, they indulged in 
disrespectful and hostile criticism of the 
college authorities, until they felt the iron 
hand of Chancellor Day. Now the in- 
fluence of the " cultured young women," 
from which President Jordan expects so 
much, was anything but wholesome, as a 
share of the hostile comment on the author- 
ities came from them. Women have ever 
been the incentive of deeds of prowess and 
strength among men. From the belted 
knight at the tourney to the crude and 
[151] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

misdirected valor of a young man in a 

mixed college, the plaudits of fair hands 

will always be the crowning glory. It is 

the mistake of coeducationists to assume 

that the massing of young men and 

women together for purposes of education 

could in any way modify the sexual com- 

— ^ plexity. It is their proud boast that the 

, presence of young women has a refining 

"r^-^nd elevating influence upon young men 

when mixed in education. The constant 

contention is made of the influence of 

" cultured " young women upon young 

men. They are not cultured; they are 

being cultured. Character is unformed. 

They are plastic, unrefined, and have not 

yet attained the stage of influence. On the 

contrary, it has been shown that when the 

young women were massed, instead of 

scattered in isolated boarding-houses, the 

men became rougher and their horse -play 

more aggressive, which even the women 

strive to emulate, as we shall see when what 

[ 152 ] 



FOR Higher Coepucation 

may be called the assault on Winchell 
Hall is described. 

The efforts of the faculty to suppress 
the pernicious social activity of the fra- 
ternities and clubs by calling into council 
and cooperation the representatives of the 
student bodies culminated in an outbreak 
of social license which caused the citizens 
of Syracuse to hold their breath. The 
following is the newspaper account of the 
incident, which resulted from a condition 
of affairs that had been in existence for 
some time, and was steadily growing 
worse. 

" Two college women, one a junior and 
the other a freshman, were expelled from 
the university yesterday noon by Chan- 
cellor James R. Day for attending a dance 
at Long Branch last Friday night. By 
so doing they disobeyed a regulation of 
Winchell Hall, the women's dormitory, at 
which they were living. This is the first 
action of the kind which has ever been 
[153] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

taken by Syracuse University. There 
was broadcast consternation among the 
students of the university when it was 
learned that two of their number had been 
expelled for doing something they had 
come to regard as only a harmless amuse- 
ment. The chancellor's action ye.sterday 
is another move in his policy in guiding 
the young women of the university in the 
way he thinks they should go. At Win- 
chell Hall, which is university property, 
stricter rules have been laid down than ever 
before, and the students living there are 
expected to adhere to them. Tuesday, 
Thursday, and Saturday nights are call- 
ing hours, and all young women must be 
home from practice and college dancing 
affairs before midnight. Long Branch 
has been tabooed." Long Branch, it may 
be explained, is a resort on Onondaga 
Lake, with dance-halls, bowling-alleys, 
and bar. It is outside the police jurisdic- 
tion of the city, and during the winter 
[154] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

months is a rough resort, never frequented 
by the better class of the community. 
" Last Friday night Mrs. J. A. R. Scott, 
chaperon of the Hall, called the young 
women in question into her apartment and 
asked them if they intended going to the 
lake to dance that evening. They told 
her that such was their intention, and they 
were requested not to go. The college 
men, with whom the young women had 
made the engagement for the party, called 
for them, and were made acquainted with 
the rule of the Hall. There was a mis- 
understanding here, it is said, and the 
party went out not intending to go to the 
lake. Then the plan was changed again, 
and it was decided to go to Long Branch 
only to bowl. The students knew that 
other college women would be at Long 
Branch that night, members of leading 
fraternities on University Hill. It was 
finally decided to go to the lake to bowl 
only, and the die was cast. When the 
[ 155 ] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

girls and their escorts reached Long 
Branch and started to bowl, the music 
from the upper floor was wafted down to 
them, and they could hear the light steps 
of the dancers as they glided over the 
smooth floor. Thinking there could be no 
harm in a single waltz or a rousing two- 
step, bowling lost its charm for them, and 
the party went to the dance-hall and spent 
a portion of the evening. They arrived 
home before midnight, however, according 
to the story. The next morning Mrs. Scott 
was informed that the young women in 
question had gone to the lake the night 
before. The matter was reported. Chan- 
cellor Day acted yesterday. It is under- 
stood that there is another young woman 
of the university living at Winchell Hall 
who may leave the university for a reason 
similar to that which has brought about 
the expulsion of the others. The chan- 
cellor said last evening that the case is 
[156] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

not yet decided." {Post- Standard, Feb- 
ruary 4, 1903.) 

As an evidence of how deeply this 
social license had contaminated the stu- 
dents, both men and women, the spirit of 
insubordination evoked by the disciplinary 
orders of the chancellor is sufficient. 
" The students feel that the authorities 
have been too severe in expelling these 
two women and in allowing the fifty or 
seventy-five others who went across the 
lake to go free. The only difference was, 
they say, that these two were from Win- 
chell Hall, where the rules forbid the 
women being out after twelve o'clock, and 
the others were from chapter-houses and 
boarding-houses." (Syracuse Evening 
Herald, February 4, 1903.) As already 
stated, this condition in the social life of 
the university grew out of the theory that 
the fraternities and inmates of sorority- 
houses would meet in a proper spirit the 
wishes of the faculty in limiting the num- 
[157] 



WoMAN''s Unfitness 

ber of social affairs and for earlier hours, 
but they proved the chief offenders in 
defying college authority. All healthy 
and proper college spirit seemed to have 
disappeared in a " college atmosphere " 
different from that which President Jor- 
dan believed would be created by coed- 
ucation, while the college authorities at 
Syracuse were taught some unpleasant 
truths about the mutual reaction of young 
men and young women when left to 
govern themselves. 

The efforts of the faculty to limit the 
meetings of the students by ordering a 
stop to the band dances was met by the 
students with a spirit not becoming in 
those who enter college for the serious 
purpose of study and moral discipline. 
From bad they went to worse in organ- 
izing the dances across the lake. When 
the order was issued placing the women 
in boarding and sorority houses under the 
same restrictions as the Winchell Hall 
[158] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

women, the students affected by the order 
were disposed to stand upon their rights, 
quoting the university catalogue, which 
reads: " The university does not provide 
board or rooms for its students. They 
select their rooms with the advice of the 
faculty, and become amenable, like other 
citizens, to the laws and ordinances of 
the city." This defines the attitude of 
the faculty toward the students, with 
the result, so far as relates to the women, 
as just described. The order of Chan- 
cellor Day wisely reversed the policy 
of the institution in this regard. In 
a chapel address he clinched his circular 
order, and put an end to any rebellion on 
the part of the women. " It is said that 
the administration may have authority 
over Winchell Hall, but not over the dif- 
ferent fraternity and boarding houses. 
Let me tell you that the university has 
absolute authority over everything con- 
nected with this institution. The univer- 
[159] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

sity trustees could, by a motion, if they 
so desired, remove the franchise of every 
fraternity on this hill. Fraternities, if 
properly run, are a great service, but there 
is another side. They sometimes conceal 
members and protect culprits. The 
authority of this institution reaches over 
all. Whenever the university speaks the 
fraternities and other clubs will have to 
observe the rules laid down. In closing 
his address the chancellor declared that 
the women of the university must be 
placed within greater restrictions than the 
men, not because they were more evilly in- 
clined, but in order to avoid any appear- 
ances of a questionable character." ( Syra- 
cuse Journal, February 11, 1903.) 

Thus falls to the ground one of the 
most ardently asserted benefits of co- 
education on the social equality theory, 
namely, the refining and restraining influ- 
ences exerted by the free and imrestricted 
social relation of the students. Any un- 
[160] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

biassed student of weak human nature 
could predict such a result unfailing. The 
conclusion is a logical one, that, according 
to the authorities of the best coeducational 
college in the country, young women can- 
not be educated the same way as young 
men in a moral and social sense. 

We have seen the bad and degenerating 
effect of young men upon women in col- 
leges for both sexes; let us see if the 
women have the elevating, refining, and 
wholesome influence upon young men that 
the advocates of the system claim they 
have. We shall be obliged to again refer 
to the newspapers. 

The occasion was the sophomore dinner 
at one of the hotels, which the freshmen 
endeavored to interrupt. Early in the 
evening the president of the freshman 
class called on a young woman in a near-by 
sorority-house. Several sophomores pres- 
ent proposed that he do a few stunts for 
the amusement of the young woman. A 
[161] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

one-sided fight resulted, from which the 
freshman tried to escape through the 
kitchen. Here he was met by the upper 
class-men and his retreat cut off. Addi- 
tional freshmen coming to the rescue, a 
destructive free fight resulted. The young 
women of the house ran screaming into 
the street, their cries attracting a crowd 
of passers-by and residents of the hill. At 
the hotel the rioting was renewed by the 
freshmen, which a force of police kept 
within bounds. At the banquet fifty 
" couples " were present. ( Syracuse Jour- 
nah February 2, 1903.) 

At Syracuse it is the usual thing for 
the freshmen to prevent the sophomore 
banquet, but a peculiar element of hostility 
was added by the attempt of some class- 
men to make the president do " stunts " 
for the amusement of young women 
sophomores, while he was a guest in their 
house. As good manners, refinement, 
gentlemanly reserve, and respect and cour- 
[ 162 ] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

tesy toward women is claimed to be a 
direct outcome of the presence of women 
in coeducation, it is proper to leave the 
reader to come to his own conclusion in 
this case. 

A freshman flag displayed from the 
roof of Winchell Hall caused a deter- 
mined assault on the building to remove 
it. Access could be gained to the roof 
only by the fire-escape. Several men 
climbed the ladder. " Within the dormi- 
tory all was excitement. From the upper 
v/indows of the building there opened a 
continuous stream of water, old shoes, 
dismantled books, and every conceivable 
missile at the men on the iron ladder. The 
leader kept on climbing; once, however, 
he faltered. A full-grown dictionary, 
hurled from a window two stories above, 
struck him between the shoulders. The 
force of the shock knocked his feet from 
the ladder. He clung fast until he had 
recovered his breath, and then continued 
[163] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

up the ladder. He was immediately fol- 
lowed by several of his companions, and 
the banner was soon in their possession." 
(Syracuse Journal, February 21, 1903.) 
It may appear that the influence of the 
women on the sophomores was somewhat 
remote, but their quickness to adopt the 
methods of the men in maintaining their 
class spirit was evident, and painfully so, 
from the standpoint of the coeducation- 
ists, who make such extravagant claims 
for the refining influence of women. A 
few more incidents and we shall conclude 
the evidence upon this disagreeable phase 
of the subject. " The Chicago coeds 
practised football tactics in their contest 
for basket-ball prestige on their new ath- 
letic field yesterday, and the result was 
that one girl was carried from the game 
and two others had to be revived 
with water before they could continue." 
(Newspaper clipping.) At Cornell, 
which is one of the most conservative col- 
[164] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

leges, the women pattern after the men, 
the " freshmen " trying to break up the 
sophomore young women's supper. They 
captured a member of the upper class and 
drove about the city in a hack during 
the evening. (Mr. Finck, in the Inde- 
pendent, ) {/ 

Moving-up day appears to be an anni- 
versary peculiar to Syracuse ; what its na- 
ture may be is not essential to the story ; as 
the years passed it was attended with more 
serious disorders. In 1902 the disorders 
were so great as to exact pledges from the 
students that the riotous proceedings 
would be omitted in future. The year 
1903 witnessed open defiance of the 
faculty, while riot reigned upon the hill. 
" Chancellor Day dwelt upon the breach 
of trust, the betrayed confidence, and the 
deceitful conduct of the freshman class." 
The result was the suspension of the 
freshman class "until all trace of last 
night's rowdyism was removed." (Syra- 
[165] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

cuse Journal, May 11, 1903.) The fresh- 
men were rebellious, meetings were held, 
they absented themselves from chapeL 
" The seats on the freshman side of the 
house were entirely vacant, the students 
of neither sex being present." ( Syracuse 
Evening Herald, May 11, 1903.) " Re- 
fined and cultured " young women aiding 
and encouraging a crowd of half -fledged 
youth in defiance of law and decency is 
the spectacle offered by coeducation in this 
instance. It is highly probable that the 
young men would not have resorted to 
such extremes if they were not applauded 
by the young women. At Northwestern 
University the young men were accus- 
tomed to stand upon the campus and 
whistle fraternity airs near Willard and 
Pearson Halls, to which the young women 
would respond by joining them. Dean 
Martha Crow discovered that the young 
women would leave very early for prayer- 
meeting for the purpose of meeting the 
[166] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

men. " Then came rumors, then revela- 
tions, and at last the declaration that the 
girls must never again respond to calls 
beneath their windows." (Press despatch, 
Syracuse Evening Herald, May 15,1903.) 
Instances such as have been given could 
be increased by the score in colleges where 
the unrestrained social relation of the 
sexes is permitted. But sufficient evidence 
is given to prove that it is the social life 
that suffers the greatest peril. If educa- 
tion is to form character, if it is to create 
the wholesome sense of social reserve, that 
is the safeguard of woman in after-life, 
then the facts that we have cited make 
unrestricted coeducation the most danger- 
ous social experiment ever undertaken. It 
is all the more dangerous to the moral 
well-being of the women students from 
the fact that these students come from 
the middle class, as we understand the 
word here; that is, they are the daughters 
mostly of poor parents, and all that they 
[167] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

know of social life and its amenities is 
learned in the crude environment of a co- 
educational college. The professors them^ 
selves, to whom they look as models of 
social deportment, leave college or tech-^ 
nical schools to take their chairs, and are 
grossly ignorant of social conventions, 
which may be regarded as one of the 
causes of the social irregularities that have 
been allowed to exist. 

Syracuse University was one of the first 
of the coeducational institutions to admit 
the inability of the faculty to exert any 
restraining influence over the social rela- 
tions existing among the students. Up 
to the present year men and women were 
allowed to live in the same house. The low 
standard of scholarship of students so situ- 
ated, and social irregularities that resulted, 
have caused the faculty to extend to stu- 
dents in mixed boarding-houses and dor- 
mitories the same rules which have been 
established at Winchell Hall. The new 
[ 168 ] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

rules say in part: " The university author- 
ities have become impressed with the im- 
portance of a httle more care in the room- 
ing habits of the students at the institution. 
Therefore, hereafter, our friends who take 
student boarders will kindly restrict their 
roomers to one sex. We wish also to urge 
upon you that our women students will 
not be allowed to retain rooms in any 
house if they are allowed to receive young 
men callers in their rooms. We will be 
grateful to you if you will inform us 
promptly if your roomers do not regard 
reasonable hours, or if you have what you 
beheve to be just complaint of any kind. 
Hereafter students will not be allowed to 
room or board at any house that is not 
registered at the office of the registrar of 
the university." (Syracuse Evening 
Herald, June 6, 1903. ) If we are obhged 
to have the sexes trained in mixed col- 
leges, every friend will rejoice at this 
complete breakdown of the practice of un- 
[169] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

restrained social relations between men 
and women students. As we have shown, 
in opinions quoted at the opening of this 
chapter, this feature of the method, which 
has caused such damage both to the social 
well-being and scholarship at Syracuse, is 
regarded as a necessity in the formation 
of character and correct social habits. "It 
takes the simper out of a young woman," 
as one able authority on coeducation puts 
it. It ought, indeed, where young women 
receive men in their rooms. One of the 
benefits that coeducationists hold before 
the public from which they recruit their 
ranks, is that the free mingling of the 
sexes in college education makes the 
men more manly and the women more 
womanly, and trains young men in the 
courtesy and respect which they ought to 
show toward women. In view of what 
has already been related, a more ridiculous 
claim can scarcely be imagined. But, leav- 
ing that out, we are not in debt to coed- 
[170] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

ucation for the position women hold in 
America. Among no other people and 
under no other civilization has woman 
enjoyed so high a place as here. Chival- 
rous courtesy and respect have been 
awarded her from the strenuous days of 
the Colonial mothers to the present. This 
innate chivalry and grace which the Amer- 
ican man bears to the American woman 
is not the product of the university or the 
college. It is found in all walks of life, 
and has been the admiration of foreigners 
and the boast of our manhood. It is the 
impulse that has impelled men to grant 
to woman her claim to equal political 
rights, to better pay for her labor, that 
has given her social freedom from the re- 
straints that hedge her in older civiliza- 
tions, and exalted her to a level that else- 
where she has never attained. This springs 
from an impulse higher than education, 
that had its origin in our hard struggle 
for political life and freedom, when 

[ in ] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

woman bore her share in the stress and 
privation by the side of her male com- 
patriot. She earned then her recognition 
and sanctification in the hearts of men 
who loved herHhat has outworn the gen- 
erations, and has worn ever since with 
matchless grace her crown of American 
womanhood. The shameless claim that 
coeducation will make our young men 
more considerate for women ought to 
brand it as a sham and an insult to our 
manhood. 

The evidence shows that there is noth- 
ing in coeducation to elevate, but every- 
thing to lower, women in the esteem of 
her fellow students. In fact, when young 
women are exposed to the deteriorating in- 
fluences of a college for both sexes, she 
invites her own degradation. She demands 
education after the manner of men, but 
she also demands treatment such as men 
give to men. The writer became aware 
of this fact by seeing two students pass 
[172] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

in the street. They were walking rapidly, 
affecting an athletic stride; without lift- 
ing his hat and with a cold stare, he said, 
"Hello, Nan;" she returned a curt 
" Hello, Jack," and both passed rapidly 
on. This, it appeared, was correct form. 
Some young men insist on lifting their 
hats, but they are regarded as Miss 
Nancys, and the practice is frowned upon 
by the women. This, of course, is a mere 
trifle, but trifles make for home life, which 
the extremists claim coeducation promotes 
in all its sacredness and purity. 



[173] 



CHAPTER VI 

Love and Marriage 

The following was sent to the press 
through the news agencies, and was widely 
published: "Chicago, June 20: Ter- 
minating courtship lasting throughout 
their college course, four Northwestern 
University students announced their en- 
gagements on the stage of the Auditorium. 
Following the announcement of the 
scholarship awards, the betrothal of two 
young men to two young senior coeds was 
made known. It was the first time in the 
history of a Western university that the 
announcement of student betrothals was 
officially made by the university officials." 
The chancellor of a minor university, on 
[174] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

being interviewed concerning student 
courtship and marriage, is reported to 
have said that the more marriages the 
better, as it was a good place to fall in 
love. As the conversation reported was 
never denied, it is assumed to be correct. 
Vital statistics record only three events in 
human life: birth, marriage, and death. 
Marriage implies in its relationship more 
of happiness and morality, or more of 
falsehood, deceit, and crime than can be 
crowded into any other act between man 
and woman, but under the morbid stimulus 
of coeducation it is stripped of the beauty 
of holiness and trotted out upon a stage 
to be greeted by the college yell. It is 
true that these young and immature peo- 
ple were only betrothed, not married, and 
let us hope that these shrinking, timid 
maids, with native modesty refined by the 
exquisite culture which the advocates of 
coeducation would have us believe is a 
special feature of their method, were dis- 
[175] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

enchanted and brought back to the stern 
reahties of Hfe by the strident college 

yell. 

In the towns in which these bisexual 
colleges are located, nothing so tends to 
bring these institutions into disrespect as 
the apparent indifference of the college 
authorities to the open love-affairs be- 
tween the students. They are openly 
spoken of as " match factories." Court- 
ship seems to be a continuous perform- 
ance, and whether with a view to mar- 
riage or not, only the Providence which 
can scan the human mind in its secret 
places knows, but for the sake of purity 
and innocence let us hope. It may well be 
that the chancellor, to the interview with 
whom we have just referred, took counsel 
with his fears when he said the more mar- 
riages the better. He was a Christian 
gentleman, and an old man and shrewd, 
and from his long experience with life 
[ 176 ] 



\ 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

he probably was in full accord with St. 
Paul. 

It is difficult to understand how staid 
and serious men, to whom is entrusted the 
education of young men and women, can 
see any good in student courtship and 
marriage. It is conceded by all educators 
that the terminal aim of education is the 
development of character. A character 
justly balanced, with discrimination and 
a clarity of vision, and a character made 
strong in the direction of self-control, is 
the best and highest test of a well-trained 
mind. To one who regards a question of 
this kind without prejudice, it would ap- 
pear impossible that an educator could 
claim that a young man or woman re- 
ceives as a product of his intellectual 
training this high criterion fully formed 
with his diploma, but rather he is given 
the right direction, he has acquired a 
standard grounded on rectitude and honor 
by which he can measure the character that 
[177] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

will mark him as a man in that higher 
education he must acquire in the great 
university of practical hfe. The advo- 
cates of student marriages make the pos-« 
itive assertion that it is better for the 
man and the young woman to get married 
while life is all untried and is as yet a 
formless ideal. They are deliberately told 
to get married as though it were a part 
of their college curriculum, and to step 
forth from the sheltering arms of their 
alma mater man and wife, untrained and 
unarmed, to battle with life, the most un- 
certain quantity and quality, for good or 
otherwise, that can be condensed in the 
human document. Surely men will allow 
their prejudices or their predilections to 
give strange distortions to their moral 
vision. 

The writer is willing to leave the ques- 
tion to the arbitration of any man who 
has acquired eminence in his profession, be 
he doctor, lawyer, or engineer, if a student 
[178] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

can leave college a married man before he 
has entered upon his professional studies, 
and give to them the same time, the same 
earnest and thorough work, as one who is 
unmarried, and whose mind is not pre- 
occupied by thoughts and emotions for- 
eign to the work before him. The coed- 
ucationists say that he can. Further, the 
question can be left to the same arbitrator. 
Can a young professional man, doctor, 
lawyer, or engineer, married at the outset 
of his professional career, have the same 
opportunity of commanding all the 
chances that make for success and emi- 
nence, as the young man unhampered by 
a wife until he has acquired a fixed posi- 
tion and a settled income? The coeduca- 
tionist again says that he can. There is 
no holding any argument with such peo- 
ple. They defy all the traditions of 
experience, good judgment, and settled 
standards. There is not an instance in 
the literature of the question in which the 
[179] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

advocates of coeducation have discussed 
the subject cahnly, philosophically, and 
with any evidence of clean hands and 
hearts. They approach a great problem 
of education, one that lies at the nucleus 
of the higher education of women, with 
rank assertion, their only argument being 
abuse and ridicule of those who doubt or 
disbelieve their methods. They are educa- 
tional pachyderms, and the only argument 
that can penetrate is the one that holds up 
before them the dollar-mark. Then they 
can perceive some logic on the other side, 
and hasten, like the Northwestern Uni- 
versity, to segregate, but not abandon the 
two-sex idea. 

Many coeducational colleges deliber- 
ately encourage courtship and marriage. 
President Wilkinson, of the Kansas State 
Normal School, says that the college pre- 
sents the best time and place for match- 
making. In President Thwing's book, 
"The College Woman," he mentions a 
[180] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

college in which a day following com- 
mencement was set apart as the day of 
weddings. Former President Fairchild, 
of Oberlin College, approved of college 
engagements. President Thwing says that 
coeducation does promote love and matri- 
mony in college, but that it does not pro- 
mote scholarship. (Mr. Finck, in the 
Independent.) 

In all that has been said by coeduca- 
tionists about student courtship and mar- 
riage, not a word has been spoken about 
the rights of parents, or guardians, or 
family interests in these marriages. This 
side of the student marriages has been in- 
sultingly ignored. If the college faculty 
approved of these marriages, such a tri- 
fling matter as the consent of parents or 
family interest in the marriage of the son 
or daughter might safely be regarded as 
a neghgible matter. President Jordan, 
in his paper in the Popular Science 
Monthly, who endeavors to be fair and 
[181] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

candid after the coeducational way, while 
approving of these marriages, leaves out 
all paternal wishes or solicitude for the 
interest or happiness of the son or daugh- 
ter. If you ask these people why they 
do this, they will tell you that coeduca- 
tion has so sharpened the mind and refined 
the judgment of young men and women 
that they may safely be left to their own 
discretion about marriage. It is impos- 
sible to conceive of any other answer that 
will justify this indifference to the most 
sacred of human ties, that of the parent 
for his child. A professor in a college 
for both sexes, to whom I spoke about 
student courtship and marriage, stated 
that such marriages were supposed to have 
the parental sanction before they were 
approved by the college authorities. But 
why should the heads of colleges, like 
President Jordan, discuss the subject at 
all; why should another college presi- 
dent recognize it from the commencement 
[182] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

platform ; why not ignore it ; why should 
a professor claim, as though it were a 
merit, that his college only recognized 
those engagements when they have the 
approval of the parents? Could the fact 
be beaten into the heads of men respon- 
sible to the public for the conduct of these 
two-sex colleges that they are bringing 
education into disrepute, that they are 
making their institutions the subject of 
ridicule in the public press, that their func- 
tion is to educate, and not to organize 
matrimonial agencies, that they are help- 
ing to wreck professional careers, that to 
nag on premature marriages they are 
helping to fill the divorce courts with the 
pitiful tales of broken hearts and sinful 
lives, that they are helping to fit the matri- 
monial yoke upon necks which in after- 
life will hold in bonds that are a mockery 
to call holy tired and helpless women and 
hopeless, irritable men? It is disgusting 
that President Jordan should assert that 
[183] 



Woman's Unfitness 

such marriages always turn out happily, 
an assertion that it is perfectly safe to 
challenge him to prove. Happy mar- 
riages are not made that way. They come 
deliberately to men who know that they are 
able to surround the object of their love 
with the material comforts and accessories 
that belong to the wife of an educated 
man, and to those who regard love as a 
serious thing wherein the man seeks and 
the woman learns to love. It does not 
spring from the accidental propinquity of 
hoiden girls and rollicking young men, or 
from the formless attachments between 
romantic girls fresh from the village high 
school and unfledged youths whose ideal 
of life and its responsibilities must be as 
intangible as a dream. 

One of the reasons for the complacent 
attitude of coeducational colleges upon 
the subject of student marriages is be- 
cause women are cheap in the matrimonial 
market. In one instance that came under 
[184] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

the observation of the writer, the young 
man was cutting his classes and giving up 
his time to a serious love-affair with a 
young girl student in a students' board- 
ing-house. He was the son of a prominent 
and wealthy man, and as soon as the affair 
became known to his people he was 
promptly removed and sent to a single-sex 
college; the worst feature of the case was 
that the state of feelings between the 
couple was equally known to the girl's 
parents, who were residents in a remote 
part of the town, the girl going to the 
boarding-house only for her dinner. This 
is only one instance of many others in 
which the one who is destined to become 
the greatest sufferer is the one whose in- 
terests are the least regarded. It may not 
be known to the authorities of bisexual col- 
leges, but it is a fact well known to others, 
that some parents send their daughters 
there for the deliberate purpose of securing 
husbands, or amorous and designing girls 
[185] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

persuade their parents to allow them to 
attend for that purpose. The facilities 
afforded by these institutions for such an 
object make the opportunities afforded 
by a summer resort appear poor and inad- 
equate. The one gives a scant oppor- 
tunity at a high price, and the other gives 
an unlimited opportunity of four years 
at a low price. Can any one, who knows 
enough of life to measure the power of 
women over men whose manhood has not 
yet developed into the full leaf, doubt 
what the result would be? In the oppor- 
tunities afforded by coeducational methods 
woman is not the tentative side of the 
problem. It is man that is safeguarded 
by the precautions of the parents or guard- 
ians. It is his career that is interrupted 
or rendered doubtful by a premature 
matrimonial experiment. It is woman 
alone whose future is secured by marriage. 
This is the social status that is given to the 
relative value of the union between the 
[186] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

sexes, and this is the value that it must 
be given in the coeducational institutions. 
They may model their colleges to conform 
to a coeducational basis, but they cannot 
overthrow the usages of society. The 
value that society places on marriage in 
its ratio between the sexes is the value that 
must be given it in the college as in social 
life. Woman is the commodity, man is 
the standard of value, and it is in this 
system of brokerage that these institutions 
assume to take a part. The liberty of the 
sexes, which is an American idea, is the 
license of coeducation. In justice to the 
inexorable dictum of society, it is only 
justice to say that the professional man, 
whose success or failure in life gives social 
status to the wife, is the only unknown 
quantity in the matrimonial equation. Yet 
the authorities of these colleges, hardly 
any of whom are adepts in social hfe and 
usage, assume in their ignorance to ap- 
prove of student marriages. A generation 
[ 187 ] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

past the young professional man on the 
threshold of his career might marry with 
some prospect of a successful future. 
That time has passed. The increasing 
complexity of business and social life 
renders it constantly more difficult to earn 
a living income in the professions. Take 
the instance of a young doctor located in 
a busy city. Between the free dispensaries 
and the hospitals with rival ambulance 
services, the clang of whose gongs can be 
heard hourly in the streets, the poor is 
as far beyond his reach as the rich. He 
has no prospect except to wait, unless he 
appeals to the public as the master of 
some specialty, to secure which, if he is 
poor, demands self-denial and sacrifice on 
his part that but few have the courage to 
encounter. The young lawyer is even in 
a worse plight. The lucrative business is 
in the possession of great firms with 
special partners. Crowded as the courts 
are with pending cases, the marked tend- 
[188] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

ency of the age is to avoid litigation. In 
court calendars with hundreds of cases, not 
more than ten per cent, actually reach a 
jury. A man working alone with a col- 
lege education and a degree in law may 
regard himself fortunate if he can secure 
a connection with some large firm as a 
collection attorney, the accounts of which 
he is not allowed to sue. He is generally 
absorbed, if he is bright and active, into 
some legal firm on a salary that is only 
remarkable in its contrast with what his 
education has cost him. 

The young engineer or architect is con- 
fronted by the same tendency of the age 
to concentration of business and special- 
ism. He is fortunate if he is able to se- 
cure a salary, and it is needless to say how 
small these salaries are to the young grad- 
uate. And yet these young men, bright, 
active, and energetic, if their mental fibre 
is of the hard and elastic quality that 
makes for success, will succeed. Now sup- 
[189] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

pose one of these poor young men marries 
on leaving college, are the conditions such 
as to make home happy, can he lavish upon 
a young wife the concentration of feeling 
and devotion that the average young 
woman believes that she is entitled to as 
a wife, and will the first born be welcomed 
with a joy untinged with regret? Will 
the average young woman with social 
ambitions give up a life of comfort and 
ease to share the home of a young man 
who is obliged to make this stern hard 
battle, sharing in his privations, his rigid 
self-denials, and give way to none of 
those regrets which are sure to show upon 
the surface and make life bitter? I ask 
these questions not of professors of col- 
leges for both sexes, or of such men as 
President Jordan, but of people of com- 
mon sense and with a practical view of 
life, who are none the less capable of love 
and sacrifice for the sake of those they 
love. 

[190] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

As more directly relating to the college 
and the serious object of the training, 
education, and moral discipline of its un- 
dergraduates, student courtship and mar- 
riage strike a blow that is fatal to the 
ideal college life and purpose. The fun- 
damental idea of the college is not to give 
one an education, for the very good reason 
that the human mind cannot be educated 
in four years, but, as far as possible, to 
perfect its graduates in the use of the 
tools, so to speak, by the correct use of 
which the finished student is capable of 
educating himself. He has acquired the 
habit of studious application ; he can logic- 
ally arrange and coordinate facts; he has 
acquired the faculty of correct reasoning 
by his insight into the higher mathe- 
matics ; in the laboratories, if he bends all 
his energies to the task, he is placed in the 
great highway to education, the knowl- 
edge of how to observe and correctly in- 
terpret what he sees. These are simply 
[191] 



Woman'^s Unfitness 

the instruments of education, and then the 
college leaves him to educate himself. If 
he, as a graduate of Yale or Princeton, 
assumes the attitude before the world that 
simply as such he is an educated man, he 
is intellectually doomed, and might better 
have limited his intellectual training to 
the three R's, as he would then have pre- 
served his rectitude against the damage 
of a false assumption. The graduate who 
realizes that his college has done much in 
giving him a sure footing on the way to 
education, if he follows that way in intel- 
lectual humility, content to seek, to him 
will come the satisfying consciousness of a 
fulfilment of his intellectual life and of 
work well and wisely done. 

The untrained youth who enters college 
and secures all this in the brief space of 
four years is the subject of a moral and 
intellectual revolution. It is a system of 
brain-building that will demand the con- 
stant use of his highest faculties. If, 
[192] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

while he is undergoing this evolution, the 
professor or college president who be- 
lieves that he has time for the distraction 
of love-making must have lost sight of 
the purpose and aim of the training, 
which the observing public has too gen- 
erously taken for granted. If to athletics 
can be added student love-making, where 
in the name of common sense is there room 
for what they are pleased to call higher 
education? From the standpoint of 
common experience, as well as from that 
of the physiologist, let us consider what 
sex-love means as it comes to the healthy 
young man and woman as student lovers, 
probably for the first time in their lives. 
With the student adolescence is completed 
and mature functional life has begun. The 
conscious life is held in the thrall of the 
emotions. It breaks through the thin 
crust of the untried and immature re- 
straining forces of the mind. All the 
higher brain attributes become slaves and 
[193] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

accomplices of the overmastering impulse, 
which runs riot through the realm of the 
higher intellectual life. This is not too 
highly colored when we consider that it is 
an organic emotion that springs from the 
subconscious life of nerve centres, over 
which the will has no control, and mounts 
upward into the supreme centre of the 
spiritual life, the cerebrum. Here it 
revels in the imagination, invades the ideo- 
motor centres, impairs the memory, dis- 
turbs the logical sequence of ideas, and 
becomes the motor factor in the conscious 
life. A college professor, in speaking 
about student love, said that it was a good 
thing for young men and women, as 
" they must learn to control such feelings." 
Very good; that form of learning is not 
included in the college curriculum; but 
control does not mean to suppress when 
it refers to the strongest emotion known 
in the life of man ; it means concealment, 
which is another unhappy feature of stu- 
[194] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

dent love. It is a college education in 
deception and addiction to deceit. An 
emotion which is as nearly a gift from 
God as any that can find its being in weak 
hmnan nature is made a thing to be hidden 
away, and its contentment, for which the 
touch of a hand or a loving word suffice, 
is made a sin or a wrong-doing. These 
young people who are thrown into the 
environment of stimulating propinquity 
have a right to love, and, as President 
Jordan says in his Science Monthly paper, 
" the wonder is rather that there are not 
more.'' Under the conditions, however, in 
which it exists, student love-making gives 
the first lessons in concealment, and the 
first conviction that there may be a per- 
sonal gain in acting a lie. What may be 
done openly is safe, that which must be 
concealed is dangerous. When love leads 
to assignation in student life it is potential 
immorality. Can anything that is possible 
to enter into student life offer more serious 
[195] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

interruption to the current of mental 
activities that favor the best results from 
his time and opportunities? In some col- 
leges there are chairs of psychology, with 
laboratories and instruments of precision, 
so-called. It is fair to ask these professors 
in colleges for men and women in the in- 
terest of science to apply their method of 
research to the investigation of student 
love, and deduce from their ascertained 
facts to what extent the proper observance 
would be disturbed by the outbreak in any 
two students of opposite sex of a serious 
instance of this emotion. It is a proper 
subject of scientific investigation, but was 
it ever attempted in the interest of coed- 
ucation? On the contrary, it is favored and 
encouraged. It is safe to take as sober 
a minded man as President Jordan, in 
the article just referred to, as one of the 
most conservative two-sex college presi- 
dents. He speaks with a tone of regret: 
"It is a constant surprise that so many 
[196] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

college men turn from their college asso- 
ciates and marry some earlier or later 
acquaintance of inferior ability, inferior 
training, and often inferior personal 
charm." In President Jordan's opinion, 
which goes to show how little he under- 
stands of love, and how little he appre- 
ciates the men who go to college to study 
instead of making love, he voices the al- 
most universal sentiment of coeducational 
authorities in regard to student love and 
marriage. Its existence is a thing hostile 
to the student life, fatal to the best efforts 
of mind, a ruinous waste of some part of 
the too brief four years that must do so 
much in shaping character and developing 
the student habit, and forms no part of the 
argument these people offer upon the sub- 
ject of coeducation. In this they are de- 
ceiving the patrons who entrust their sons 
and daughters to their care, and are giving 
a retrograde movement to the cause of 
higher education. 

[ 197 ] 



CHAPTER VII 

The Shadow Side of Coeducation 

A SERIOUS subject seriously considered 
may contain many things that will give 
painful reading to some, and be regarded 
as of doubtful propriety by others. This 
chapter would have been omitted had the 
statements it contains been based upon any 
other evidence than the personal knowl- 
edge of the author. As such it must stand 
as a document against a policy in educa- 
tion that has made such a shameful record 
possible. The sin and disgrace recoil^ not 
upon the innocent victims, but upon those 
whose ill-advised and crudely matured 
plans of coeducation have brought to- 
gether an ill-assorted concourse of both 
[198] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

sexes without the sohcitude and tender re- 
straints of home. With singular inconse- 
quence the imperious laws of sex have been 
overlooked. It appears impossible to ex- 
plain the mental attitude of coeducational 
college authorities upon the subject. It 
is charity to believe that it is due to igno- 
rance. The denominational influence, 
which each college was founded to pro- 
mote, was supposed to throw ample re- 
straints about the students, forgetting that 
there are border-lines in spiritual growth 
and fixity beyond which religion never 
passes, and artificial moral restraints are 
overwhelmed by organic impulse that 
obeys the strenous demands of the higher 
law, and this law is the law of the God 
of nature. Facing such a problem as this, 
what is done to adequately safeguard the 
students, presupposing that coeducation is 
to continue in its present form? 

Religious influence, almost without ex- 
ception of a denominational character, is 
[199] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

the most active agent in the moral restraint 
of the students. The promotion of Chris- 
tian associations among the students, with 
enforced attendance at college chapel and 
regular church attendance are the main 
influences under the direct control of the 
college authorities. Membership in the 
better class of secret societies is in many 
instances dependent upon the correct con- 
duct of the student. The suppression of 
any known infraction of the college rules 
and regulations relating to conduct or 
class work, and the college has gone as 
far as it can, either in mixed colleges or 
in those dealing with but one sex. As 
a matter of fact, faculties of mixed col- 
leges are organized on the basis of colleges 
for a single sex. The vast difference in 
the government of institutions implied by 
the presence of both sexes is not recog- 
nized. The chairs are filled mostly by 
young men, the majority of whom are 
unmarried, whose duties begin and end 
[ 200 ] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

with their class-room work, and however 
anxious they might be to get in touch with 
the social and moral life of the students, 
they have but little tact to go outside of 
their pedagogical work. In talking with 
a young professor about a case that was 
known to both of us, he said: "I have 
had an interview with the young man and 
seriously cautioned him, and it has done 
no good; of course, I made a mistake; I 
ought to have taken the case before the 
faculty; now if I were to do so I would 
be denounced by both classes as a spy and 
an informer, and not only lose my influ-- 
ence among them, but I might even en- 
danger my position." 

The majority of the smaller colleges 
have no dormitories with proper separa- 
tion of the sexes, but students are taken 
into families for board and lodging open 
to both sexes. It was stated by one pro- 
fessor that this was encouraged as being 
better than separation of the students, as 
[ 201 ] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

it tended to create an atmosphere of 
" home Hfe." Surely, it must be a pro- 
fessional idea from the point of view of 
coeducation if a boarding-house could 
create the atmosphere of a home simply 
by the commingling of young men and 
women. The students are placed upon 
their honor to preserve a proper and dis- 
creet deportment toward each other. In 
older countries, where the sex problem is 
taken practically, the deportment of the 
sexes is placed upon a standard of per- 
sonal honor; yet a vigilant oversight is 
never relaxed by those who are responsible 
for the reputation of young women. In 
this country, among coeducational insti- 
tutions, this would be resented as an 
insulting suspicion of a young woman's 
character. Attending a college for men, 
she demands the liberties and license of 
young men, and for the honor of our 
young women be it said that she acquits 
herself in her self-respecting attitude 
[ 202 ] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

toward her own and the other sex in a 
manner that would justify, if nothing else 
were needed, the theory and practice of 
coeducation. But the advocates of coed- 
ucation have no right to trade upon the 
innate nobleness and fortitude of char- 
acter of our young women, without re- 
specting it and throwing about it every 
possible protection. Lead us not into 
temptation, is the way the Christian is 
taught to pray by One who knows the 
human heart in all its weakness. Thou- 
sands of the young, the flower of Ameri- 
can youth, are being so led by so-called 
Christian colleges, with what results in 
wrecked lives or in unforgetable misery 
the Lord who taught us so to pray alone 
knows. The young human being at the 
beginning of functional activity needs the 
directing and restraining hand of those 
who have not outlived the memory of the 
tribulations of their own youth. This is 
not a surveillance that imphes doubt or 
[203] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

suspicion; it is the natural solicitude of 
those who love and trust, but would shield 
from harm, temptation, or the appearance 
of evil. The affections and emotions are 
the vulnerable places in a woman's armor, 
irrespective of age. Should she be young, 
untried, ignorant of the world and of men, 
warm-hearted and affectionate, in full 
health and with abundant nutrition, she 
is safeguarded only by her high and 
romantic ideas; if any coeducator alleges 
that such an example can be thrown 
among a miscellaneous gathering of both 
sexes for four years without moral risk, 
I have no words that are proper to use 
which will fitly describe that man's igno- 
rance of human nature. As a physician, 
we have watched the after-career of young 
girls, tenderly reared in Christian homes, 
who, at the psychological moment have 
lain prone before the victorious emotions. 
This type of young woman never recruits 
the ranks of the unfortunate. It is her 
[204] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

one glimpse at the shadow side of hfe, 
whence flows the fountain, to taste of 
which is not always sin, and that it is 
not sin is the horror of it. That it did 
not come of unholy desire, but of emotions 
and affections that are like peerless gems 
in the diadem of womanhood, makes the 
memory abide with her always, regrettable, 
unappeasable. The material side of her 
future may not be touched. I have known 
many of them afterward to become happy 
wives and mothers, but the galled spot 
was there, just where the neck-yoke that 
bears the burden of life presses the hardest 
upon her tender bosom. How many in- 
stances such as this has coeducation in our 
colleges made possible? Do the members 
of the faculty know, or, if they know, 
will they give us their experience? The 
dean of a college where the sexes are 
mixed told me he did not believe that it 
had ever occurred, and those who brought 
such charges against Christian colleges 
[ 205 ] 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

were unregenerate or unworthy of belief. 
The authorities of mixed colleges have no 
other defence than a general denial. 

This is more a question of physiology 
than of morality, in the need of a suspen- 
sion of the unrestrained social contact of 
the sexes during a period of early crisis 
in functional activity. This is the rule 
on the part of intelligent parents in every 
well-regulated home. That this crisis is 
outlived by every young man and young 
woman of about twenty is the theory upon 
which coeducation bases its factor of moral 
safety. The sexual attributes are often- 
times referred to as an instinct. In the 
lower ranges of animal life it is actually a 
madness. Man, who can look into the 
depths of his own emotions, knows that 
fasting and prayer and the macerations 
of the flesh will not suppress those feel- 
ings, which are necessary for the perpet- 
uation of his race. These spring from the 
activity of organic life, the products of 
[206] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

nerve centres and of ganglia, with which 
the supreme nerve depot, the brain, has 
nothing to do. The range of the potential 
activity of these emotions has reached its 
maximum when physical life has gained its 
first maturity. It is at this time, when the 
mind is plastic and open to the impressions 
of its environment, that wholesome, re- 
straining influences are needed for sup- 
pression and self-government. At this 
time the young instinctively flock together 
in song and dance, which is right and inno- 
cent; but in the normal relations of the 
sexes these periods of enjoyment cease, 
and all come under home influence and re- 
straint. It is not so in mixed American col- 
leges of the minor class with the students 
in common boarding-houses. The strain on 
the forces of self -suppression must be 
enormous and in some cases pitiable. Is it 
any wonder that the moral tension some- 
times exceeds its hmits, and breaks under 
the strain? Education under conditions 
[207] 



W" 



WoMAN^'s Unfitness 

such as these appears impossible in its 
higher forms. The chief end of education 
is to form character, to build up a high 
degree of receptive intelligence, which will 
prolong itself beyond the period of train- 
ing in constant accretions of knowledge 
and self-government. But here is edu- 
cation inviting the issue of battle with 
the forces which it is one of its aims to 
direct and control ; trying on the one hand 
to lead to culture and a spiritual life, while 
on the other it is cultivating by environ- 
ment the lowest form of organic emotion, 
which is obtruding itself into the conscious 
life, and is not interchangeable with any- 
thing spiritual, or mental, which education 
can create or promote. 

There ought not to be any divergent 
opinions upon this vital point in coeduca- 
tion. Those who believe in it and those 
who do not ought to be in accord here, and 
make the social life of the sexes possible 
only in the class-room. >The extreme to 
[208] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

which college athletics are carried is an- 
other element of weakness in the American 
theory of coeducation. ^^A young woman, 
who will resist all the blandishments of 
mind and form, will, in spite of religious 
training, high social standing, and educa- 
tion, drift into abject sadism in the pres- 
ence of the prowess of brawn and muscle. 
It has been so in all ages of the world; 
from the classic Olympian games, the 
bloody victories of the arena, the valor of 
the savage warrior, women have loved and 
applauded. 

It may be objected that we are going 
far afield, but it must be remembered that 
we are speaking about the basic emotions 
that sway and shape human lives as the 
wind sways the sturdy oak, and not the 
love that the poet sings, or that has 
adorned history with the subhmest exam- 
ples of self-sacrifice and devotion that live 
eternally as inspirations. Furthermore, 
the stimulating effect of athletic exhibi- 
[209] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

tions by men upon the emotions of young 
women at their most susceptible age, ap- 
pears to be overlooked by those who have 
grafted the mixed element upon colleges 
organized solely for men, and to which 
women, irrespective of fitness, are obhged 
to conform. 

Guardedly as a matter of this nature 
must be discussed for the general public, 
enough has been said to show the possible 
evils that may result from forcing higher 
education along hnes hostile to the phys- 
ical and moral well-being of young men 
and women. There are the potential evils, 
but the actual ones form one of the darkest 
chapters in the history of coeducation. 

To give specific instances of moral 
downfall directly traceable to the unre- 
strained relations of the sexes in colleges 
where coeducation is encouraged to its 
social limits is painful to the writer, and 
is sure to be anything but agreeable to the 
reader. But it becomes a duty in view 
[210] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

of the fact that the advocates of coeduca- 
tion never defend the method, but assault 
any one in harsh and insulting terms who 
may venture to question its merits. Noth- 
ing but hard facts, revolting as they may 
be, will force the conviction that they who 
object to coeducation as it is conducted 
in mixed colleges have valid reasons for 
their objections, and have a right to de- 
mand a respectful hearing. To the de- 
tailed instances that are offered in evi- 
dence, many more could be gathered from 
the police of Syracuse, who maintain a 
strict surveillance over those who frequent 
houses of assignation. It, however, ought 
not to be necessary to add instances as 
culminative evidence to convince all right- 
thinking people of the actual evils inherent 
to the mingling of the young adult sexes 
in coeducation. 

The son of a well-known professional 
man sought the advice of a physician for 
the cure of a venereal disease contracted 
[211] 



WOMAN^'S UnFITTSTESS 

from a student. The patient stated that 
several young men were ahke affected, 
contracted from the same source. Two of 
them later sought the advice of the same 
physician. With the purpose of prevent- 
ing the further spread of the disease, one 
of the patients was induced to bring the 
young woman to the physician. She was 
a small brunette, about twenty-two years 
of age, very evidently in poor health. She 
was a student in the classical course, and 
well along in her junior year. She felt 
too keenly the disgrace of her position to 
give confidence to her physician, and it was 
not until after several weeks, when her 
health was nearly restored, that she was 
induced to relate her history. She was 
the only daughter of a widow living in a 
small village, who had nearly exhausted 
her scant resources in educating her 
daughter. She had received her prepar- 
atory education in the local academy, 
and was admitted to college, conditioned 
[212] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

in two topics, which she made up be- 
fore the completion of her sophomore 
year. During her second year her ac- 
quaintance with a fellow student had 
ripened into love, and they became en- 
gaged. So far as worldly position was 
concerned he was rather superior socially 
to the young lady. When he informed 
his parents of the engagement, positive 
objections were made, he was removed 
from that college and entered in another 
institution. In the meanwhile, they were 
for many hours daily in each other's so- 
ciety, often alone, and love's dream had 
ended in a fateful reality. Her lover had 
submitted so readily to the orders of his 
people, and he had withdrawn from his 
engagement with so little show of feeling, 
that to her unhappiness was added a dan- 
gerous element of cynicism and doubt of 
the existence of goodness and purity. She 
was of an ardent, passionate nature, and 
in her unhappy and discouraged state of 
[213] 



Woman s Unfitness 

mind nothing but the material side of life 
appeared left to her. The first was not 
the final step, but not from waywardness. 
It was the morbid, hysterical seeking after 
sympathy and consolation, the wounded 
spirit, as it were, finding a balm and heal- 
ing in the very thing from which it had 
received its hurt. In her weakened powers 
of resistance, the continued fret and 
temptation of her environment, were added 
burdens to drag her down. The accident 
of disease appeared the one thing needed 
to show to her the degradation of her 
position, and that what was once sancti- 
fied by love, as so many falsely reason, was 
now becoming sin. She rescued herself, 
as many another has done, and completed 
her college career with moderate success. 
After teaching school a few years she mar- 
ried, and is now the mother of several 
children. 

The daughter of a man in a good social 
position in a neighboring town entered col- 
[214] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

lege. She was given a letter of introduc- 
tion to a physician, well known to her 
father, soliciting his care when she was 
in need of professional services. She pre- 
sented her letter at the only interview the 
physician ever had with her. He never 
saw her after, except on rare occa- 
sions in the street. One stormy night in 
November, while waiting near the prin- 
cipal railroad station for a street car, 
nearly opposite a notorious " Raines law 
hotel " which had been raided many times 
by the police, all of which had been duly, 
and elaborately, reported in the local 
papers, he saw a couple emerge at the side 
door. The young woman, especially in 
manner and dress, differed so completely 
from the class of women who frequent 
such resorts, that he gave her close atten- 
tion. Something familiar in her face and 
figure recalled the young lady of the letter. 
On board of the well-lighted car the iden- 
tification was complete: it was the same 
[215] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

young lady. The problem the doctor had 
to decide was a delicate one. Between 
loyalty to his friend and his duty to the 
young woman, whose physical well-being 
was left to his charge, there was inter- 
posed the instinctive reluctance of a man 
to be regarded as an intruder where he had 
no business. At any rate, the letter of 
introduction warranted his speaking to 
her ; she professed not to know him, which 
may readily have been the truth, as a year 
and a half, or more, had passed since the 
interview. The mention of her father's 
name and the letter recalled the incident. 
She showed not the least embarrassment, 
but there was a glint of defiance and 
bravado about her face and manner that 
suggested that she was carrying it off 
with a high hand, and which, so far as the 
doctor was concerned, relieved the situa- 
tion of some of its delicacy. She flushed 
hotly, not with shame, for she was evi- 
dently violently angry, when she was in- 
[216] 



FOR Higher Coeducation 

formed of the frightful danger of visiting 
a resort that was constantly under the 
espionage of the police, and might have 
led to her arrest. The resentful interview 
on the car ended in a reluctant promise to 
call upon the doctor. It needed a sharp 
letter to make her keep her promise. The 
battle that followed was one that threw 
a strong light on one side of the many 
phases of human nature. It resulted in her 
finally consenting to change from the uni- 
versity to a single-sex college for women. 
This occurred many years ago. The lady 
is unmarried, and keeps house in a fault- 
less manner in a motherless home. As a 
matter of fact, so long as it was regarded 
as a simple question of veracity between 
the two, the young woman was arrogantly 
defiant, and it was only when she was 
convinced that both she and her student 
lover had been seen and identified by the 
detective who was assigned to watch the 
[217] 



WoMAN^s Unfitness 

house that she consented to change her 
college. 

A young woman in her junior year in a 
certain college was admitted to a private 
room in a general hospital suffering from 
sepsis, caused by an attempt to avert the 
consequences of an affair. The young 
woman was too sick to submit to any direct 
inquiries into her history. The appear- 
ance of the family that gathered at her 
bedside was that of the better class of 
country people. The condition of the 
patient became so desperate that it was 
thought proper to take some member of 
her family into counsel. An older sis- 
ter was selected to bear the burden of the 
revelation. Astonishment and incredulity 
was what was to be expected under the 
circumstances. Such an event in the girl's 
life was nearly impossible from what she 
knew of her sister's character. Modest, 
diffident, and retiring, truthful and sin- 
cere, she would not believe such an affair 
[ 218 ] 



roR Higher Coeducation 

possible, nor was her faith shaken until 
she listened to the confession of her sister. 
The girl was loyal to her lover, and aside 
from his being a fellow student his name 
never passed her lips, in spite of her sis- 
ter's earnest solicitations. The girl finally 
recovered, but many months passed before 
her restoration to full health. Aside from 
the fact that she left college, nothing was 
known of her after-history. 

All criminologists know that cases of 
sexual depravity occur, and are as fre- 
quent in one sex as the other. They also 
know that no station or occupation in life 
is exempt from the occurrence of sporadic 
cases of this unbalanced condition of the 
organic emotions. It is not an anomaly, 
therefore, that the quiet ranks of students 
in a mixed college should be invaded by 
the sexual pervert. But what is singular 
is the fact that the young woman, the sub- 
ject of this report, passed through college 
in spite of the suspicion against her which 
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WoMAK''s Unfitness 

existed among the students. She had her 
intimates among the female students, sev- 
eral of whom were observed to be her con- 
stant associates when in the streets. As a 
student she was more than usually bright 
and quick. She was also a medical case, 
and as her ailment necessarily revealed her 
character she talked with a total absence of 
reticence. It was impossible to associate 
any consciousness of sin or wrong-doing 
with the acts which she openly confessed. 
She professed to believe that all young 
men and women were just like herself in 
respect to conduct, and so far as the young 
men whom she met are concerned she may 
have had grounds for her belief. She was 
too shrewd to have anything to do with 
the fellows on the " hill," as she expressed 
it. She became engaged to one of them, 
who graduated a year before her class, and 
who secured a position on a newspaper. 
When she graduated she went West and 
they were married. Their married life 
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FOR Higher Coeducatio 



N 



was not successful, and in a couple of 
years she became a divorced woman. This 
case would have been omitted were it not 
for the sincere belief that in a college for 
women only such a character could not 
have passed through four years of college 
life without detection and expulsion. It 
demonstrates the strange need of over- 
sight in the individual, and indiif erence to 
one of the most important sides of educa- 
tion, that which aids in character building. 
There is nothing in a classical curriculum 
that does it. It is the handiwork of the 
instructor who sees in the upbuilding of 
a symmetrical, perfectly poised character 
the best side of education. 

These cases occurred during a period of 
about eighteen years. A limited number 
of cases upon which to predicate a general 
condemnation of a great system of educa- 
tion, but the offences are of such a char- 
acter, and so fatally opposed to all ideals 
of both the methods and final results of 
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WoMAN^s Unfitness 

education, that a single instance directly 
traceable to the commingling of the sexes 
in education is sufficient to condemn the 
method. 

A sporadic case is as positive proof of 
the existence of a disease as an epidemic. 

We have additional evidence furnished 
by men in high position in mixed colleges, 
and who ought to know of these things. 
President Jordan, in his Popular Science 
Monthly article, says " that evil results 
sometimes arise — not often, to be sure, 
but once in awhile." The final clause in 
this extract is so puerile that one can 
hardly believe that it is written by a sane 
man. He traces the cause to adverse con- 
ditions: when little girls of preparatory 
schools and schools of music are mingled 
with the college students, and given the 
same freedom, and where young women 
are forced to rent parlors and " garrets " 
in houses of an unsympathetic village. 
But the facts do not bear President Jor- 
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FOR Higher Coeducation 

dan out. Where do the young women 
students always come from if not from 
the preparatory school, and in both the 
Northwestern University and at Syracuse 
the social disorders originated in the dor- 
mitories. President Jordan's attitude 
toward this question is not that of a Chris- 
tian gentleman. To confess the possibility 
of such an evil to a girl because she is poor 
and is living in a " garret " is grossly un- 
just. It is an insult to the great army of 
young women, who are poor and live in 
" garrets," and yet. so live with soul un- 
sullied, pure in body and in mind. This 
is only another instance of the weak, silly, 
and flippant manner that the advocates 
of coeducation use in treating the serious 
problems involved in their method. 

The chancellor of Syracuse University 
furnishes the next item of evidence. He 
refers to it in the simple, manly way that 
is characteristic. He does not explain it, 
he offers no insult to a student because 
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WoMAN^s Unfitness 

she rooms in a " garret," he makes no 
statement whether the instances are rare 
or otherwise; we simply know that the 
evil exists and is punished. He is speak- 
ing of the disciplinary practice of the in- 
stitution. "It is never the practice to 
dismiss a student for a single act, unless 
it be immorality." (Syracuse Evening 
Herald, February 4, 1903.) 

With an entire lack of the fitness of 
things on the part of an ardent coeduca- 
tional advocate, Prof. E. E. Slosson places 
the blame for the social evil in mixed col- 
leges upon the women alone. He says: 
" There are girls who are not fit to be 
sent to a coeducational college; who get 
harm and who do harm. When such are 
detected, the president usually invites 
them into his private office and gives them 
the same advice that Hamlet gave to 
Ophelia." (The Independent) With 
rare tact he attempts to propitiate the 
mothers of these erring daughters, by add- 
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FOR Higher Coeducation 

ing that in fairness he ought to state that 
these cases are not often congenital. 

The friends of coeducation may answer 
that such instances occur in the same class 
outside of college life. This is true; but 
is not the answer a fatal objection? If it 
is a recognized evil, as it certainly is, what 
precautions have they taken to render the 
evil impossible in college life? In what 
way have young men and women been 
safeguarded against moral contamination? 
This is what good government and clean 
society demand. The authorities of mixed 
colleges must come up to the moral stand- 
ard of the best homes in the communities 
in which they exist. They must prove that 
they do so, and that their system of mixed 
education contains methods of supervision, 
direction, and suppression in matter of 
character and morals, otherwise society 
will suppress them in the interest of good 
government. 

THE END. Y 

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V ie ^ 



